Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what's even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see - and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What's to be done?

If you want to track the most popular fan pages on Facebook, AllFacebook pushed out a new Facebook Pages Tracker last night that keeps stats on 611,213 fan pages on the social network. Only about 57,000 of those pages have more than 1,000 fans.

Now, we’ve finally got the final numbers from 2008, and with them, a look at the rankings and trends within the top 20 social networks, according to Nielsen Online.
Here are the highlights:
- Facebook nearly caught MySpace in traffic. MySpace had 58.4 million unique visitors in December, Facebook had 55.2 million.
- Facebook passed MySpace in time per person: 2 hours, 7 minutes to 1 hour, 40 minutes.
- The fastest growing sites were Twitter (664%), Tagged (421%), and Ning (303%)
- Of the sites in the top 20, three saw traffic declines in 2008: Meetup (-7%), Flixster (-6%), and MySpace (-3%)
- Time spent on social networks decreased for 14 of the 20 sites on the list.

More excellent insight from Fred Wilson about Internet startups, online business models, and revenue vs. cash. Important insight for anyone in business that needs to understand how next-generation economics are not what Wall Street was doing, but what the Web is doing today.

o a business is worth the sum of all of its future profits, discounted back to a net present value (buffet thinks this is the intrinsic value).
its a lot easier to decrease costs than increase revenues.
forget that ROE is so high for companies like craigslist. have a 1B company on 30 employees. any need to get big and grow.

At the conference, Facebook asked a range of questions to its users around the world, before feeding the answers back to delegates within minutes. It selectively-targeted users in Palestine and then Israel with the same question about global peace, before debating the results at a discussion forum. It also asked 120,000 US members whether US President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package would be enough to save the US economy. Almost 60pc said it would not.

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world's largest market research databases.
In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site... it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.

Market research company eMarketer recently cut its estimate of advertising spending on the social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, this year by £351m to £912m. It said US advertising spending on Facebook
will fall by 20pc to £147m

adults, like teens, are there to socialize with their friends and people they already know. Nearly nine in ten social network users (89%) say they use the networks to stay in touch with friends, and 57% say they use it to make plans with friends. Under half (49%) use the sites to make new friends.

As we battle a global recession, corporations are looking for new ways to sell their products and engage their consumers. Many have turned to the Internet, with Social Media in particular, to market their goods. Let’s take a look at 10 companies that have done a phenomenal job of taking advantage of social media platforms.

You've probably heard how much the micro-blogging service Twitter can help your business, or that being on social networking site Facebook can boost your company's profile. But what you might not have considered is the potential danger in over-relying on these startups that could go out of business, get bought out, or close your account if you aren't familiar with their Terms of Service.

If you're not ready to expose everything about you to anyone who asks to be your online friend, it's time you learned how to use Facebook's friend lists.

How to keep stuff you want open open and stuff you want secret secret. Includes discussion of Facebook's own advice about it.

This is interesting because social networking is not just about staying in touch. We now selectively chose who to communicate with as well as who can communicate with us and how much they can know about us.

Tonight Facebook has made a number of updates to the Facebook platform one of which is the opening of status updates. In order to get Facebook statuses, you no longer need to use a session ID to access statuses. This is a huge update and one that I think is going to take Facebook to the next level. There are additional updates listed in the Facebook blog post:

Tonight Facebook has made a number of updates to the Facebook platform one of which is the opening of status upd ...

Best practices for parents with children who are under the age of 18 and using Facebook

To help kids reach their full potential, parents today must know about Facebook. That’s the purpose of this website. Starting now, parents can enroll in a free course at Stanford to learn more about Facebook. The course instructors are psychologist Dr. BJ Fogg of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab and BJ’s sister, Linda Phillips, a mom with kids from college age to 5th grade. Parents can also sign up for a free newsletter about Facebook, created especially for parents with kids under 18 using the service.

Offered by Stanford, no less

an online education program for parents to learn about Facebook including tips on making sure their children are practicing responsible online citizenship. The homepage of Facebook for Parents offers five tips for parents just beginning to learn about Facebook. Facebook for Parents has a free email newsletter for parents to keep up to date on the latest research and best practices for keeping kids safe online.

To help kids reach their full potential, parents today must know about Facebook. That’s the purpose of this website.
Starting now, parents can enroll in a free course at Stanford to learn more about Facebook. The course instructors are psychologist Dr. BJ Fogg of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab and BJ’s sister, Linda Phillips, a mom with kids from college age to 5th grade.
Parents can also sign up for a free newsletter about Facebook, created especially for parents with kids under 18 using the service.

Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine.

Change in Facebook's Terms of Service: In short, all of the content you’ve ever uploaded on Facebook can be used, modified or even sublicensed by Facebook in every possible way - even if you quit the service.

Ever tried to leave Facebook and found out they only allow you to "deactivate" your account? All your personal data, including photos, interests, friends etc will still be saved indefinitely! You don’t have to be a conspiracist to find this quite fishy (or simply annoying)!
Look further down for instructions on how to get your account permanently deleted.

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Presidend Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?

We’ve put together a roundup of tools, resources and great advice to help you grow your network - in two groupings. The first group of links contain tools and advice on finding the people you want to connect with - colleagues and also those people who are the influentials in your areas. The second group serves up expert resources and advice to help you connect, build and nourish your network once you identify the right people.

In social media, who you know — or who knows you — can certainly make all the difference. That’s why figuring out who to connect with and taking the time to build relationships with these people is key to leveraging the power of social media.

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist. The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, & director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

A conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and chairman of Ning and an investor in several startups including Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. Best known as co-author of Mosaic, and founder of Netscape. He is on the Board of Directors of Facebook and eBay

Fantastic interview -- gives a great overview of entrepreneurship, how Silicon Valley works, social networking, the current state of the economy, and where innovation is likely to come from in the future. Highly recommended.

Interested in joining a community based site but not sure which one is right for you? There are many different options out there that will cater to your specific interests and demographic. You can start by asking yourself a few questions. Is your interest in technology more Linux-based, or more camera-phone-to-take-picture-of-self-based? Would you like to make connections for business relationships or communicate to your legions of followers that you will be 'AFK' for the next 45 seconds while using the restroom? Yes, there is a little something for everyone here in cyberspace, and these demographic breakdowns of each social site will help you to choose the right community for you.

"What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group."

Here's The Economist article on FB. The best quote: ...people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are "broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-7% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men. “People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says. - Tac Anderson

"...Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends."

That means Google most likely really, really wants to buy Twitter. (So does Facebook, but we'll get to that in a second). The great twist: Evan and Biz, two of the key co founders of Twitter, have already sold a company to Google (Blogger) and most likely are not keen to do it again. Nor do they have to, given their recent funding and the money they made from pre-IPO Google options.

Last fall, Facebook launched a major site redesign that primarily impacted the profile page, home page, and application developers. With the redesign, the Facebook profile page changed from a “box-oriented” design to a “Wall and tabs” design to make sharing more prominent and viral. Now, Facebook is preparing advertisers and brand managers for a similar redesign to its Pages product for businesses that could launch as soon as sometime in the next few weeks.

Social media comes in a variety of flavors, each with a very different end result. Networking campaigns occur on social sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn where users or companies interact with others in the community. Social media news campaigns push content out onto larger social news networking sites like Digg and Reddit. While both of these are types of social media marketing, the results are anything but similar.
The main concept behind social media networking is that users can connect and communicate with each other. Usually a successful social media networking campaign isn’t judged by the traffic sent, but by the relationships built.

What Results Can I Expect From My Social Media Campaign? http://bit.ly/APk8y

Social media comes in a variety of flavors, each with a very different end result. Networking campaigns occur on social sites like Twitter, Facebook and

A 25-year-old Caltech graduate student has developed a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.

WSJ - Digits

Anyone who has ever sought to justify their own musical or literary taste may find some solace in the side project of Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old Caltech graduate student known for embarrassing numerous corporations with his WikiScanner, the database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia entries.

Using facebook statistics to find correlation between intellegence and taste.

Twitter will complement other forms of media, he said, the way that blogs and newspapers co-exist. “New media never kill old media,” he said. “It’s all part of an ecosystem.”
Mr. Williams emphasized many times that, despite its buzz, Twitter is still a tiny, two-year-old company with just 25 employees. “It’s good that the expectations are high, but give us a minute,” he joked.

Throughout the talk, he mentioned several big projects that Twitter plans to tackle but hasn’t yet. One is moving its search function, which is hard to find, to the home page. Twitter also wants to make it easier for users to find their friends on the service, filter the people they follow and form groups so they can control which messages reach which of their followers.

Over the past few years Facebook has witnessed a dramatic rise in new user adoption and with that rise has come the opportunity for brands to interact directly with exis ...

There are numerous ways for brands to leverage Facebook but the overall branded experience is becoming increasingly integrated into a single offering as the new Pages product highlights. So what are the primary benefits and changes for the new branded pages?

Wonderful account of the role of blogs today and a possible foretelling of their decline as "microblogging" becomes the norm.

Depending on which numbers you source or believe, all reports agree that the blogosphere continues to expand globally.

It goes back to the definition of authority. Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.

Brian Solis on the dispersion of blogging's impact through micromedia and communities, and the need for broader measures of "authority"

However, a disruptive trend is already at play. While blogs are increasing in quantity, their authority–as currently measured by Technorati–is collectively losing influence.

Depending on which numbers you source or believe, all reports agree that the blogosphere continues to expand globally. As the leading blog directory and ... ( 10 maart 2009)

Social networking has clearly reached a tipping point. Sites like MySpace and Facebook boast hundreds of millions of members. Barack Obama's presidential victory demonstrated that platforms like YouTube and Twitter could transform electoral politics. Yet in corporations where such tools have been expected to bring profound transformations, there has been strong resistance to change.

An amazing set of open source frameworks for the iPhone, including a Photos-style image viewer with pinch and arrow buttons, a Table View that loads its data from a web source over time and some network connection caching classes. It really seems like we could use all of this! Oh, and Joe Hewitt was the creator of iUI.

Facebook's redesign, and why customer feedback shouldn't be the only driver of a product's development....

My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to say that if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.

The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Not only is that huge growth in one year, but in one month as well, as in January, Twitter.com clocked in with 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month

Maybe it’s Jimmy Fallon’s integration of it into his new TV show, Shaq’s use of it to interact in real-life with fans, or blog’s ability to write about it non-stop, but one way or another, Twitter’s growth just continues to explode.

Social network usage has overtaken email. More and more people are using social networks to communicate with others rather than email. This trend is evolving and growing.

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over Facebook die email vervangt

"'You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn't know if your friends even wanted to see it. Now you can put something out there and let people engage with it.' The simplicity and ubiquity of some of these services is beginning to see activity feeds and status updates replace many of the uses to which e-mail was once put."

Status updates on sites such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are a new form of communication, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard.
"We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0," David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer said.

For many companies a Facebook (Facebook reviews) fan page is an integral part of their social media campaign. But, what elements help fan pages build up large followings and what can brands do to emulate the success of others? I’ve put together a list of specific elements that I believe have helped create fan pages with large, engaged, followings.

The Adobe Flash Platform and Facebook Platform provide the ideal solution for building rich, social experiences on the web.

Flash & Facebook. They both begin with F.

from the Adobe Developer Connection website

The Adobe Flash Platform and Facebook Platform provide the ideal solution for building rich, social experiences on the web. Flash is available on more than 98% of Internet-connected PCs, so people can immediately access the applications, content, and video that enable social interactions.

ways to fine-tune your profile for maximum affect. So here are five tips to optimize your activities on Facebook, including the right way to create profile and thumbnail graphics, how to show different content to Fans and non-Fans, creating DIY vanity urls, and how managing what and when you post can lead to greater success.

1. Know your audience
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Too many people are sharing information to the wrong audiences. Your manager doesn’t want to know if you just went to the bathroom and, although your parents would love to eavesdrop on your relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend, you might not want to share those details. Since our lives are starting to converge more and more every day, you need to decide what audiences you want to connect with on Facebook.
2. Decide on your branding strategy
3. Set your privacy settings
4. Fill out your profile completely
5. Import contacts and grow your network
6. Update your status
7. Start a group or a page
8. Join or start an event in your area
9. Link out to your Facebook profile
10. Feed your social networks

A Study showing potential learning benefits of social networking site like myspace and facebook

Article from Harvard about positives to teens using social networking today.

A new study by Harvard alum Christine Greenhow finds social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have more educational potential than you might think.

I just co-wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation about the use of new technologies in the classroom. We're only on the cusp of this, and we need to harness the energy and interest that kids currently have for these things.

Harvard Graduate School of Education article on social networking as an educational tool

Social networks are taking off in China. The following guest post by George Godula. David Li, and Richard Yu explores how Chinese social networks are pursuing different business models than their American counterparts, relying more on micropayments and the sale of virtual goods.

Editor’s Note: Social networks are taking off in China. The following guest post by George Godula. David Li, and Richard Yu explores how Chinese social networks are pursuing different business models than their American counterparts, relying more on micropayments and the sale of virtual goods. George Godula is the co-founder of Web2Asia, an East Asian incubator and also a consultancy for Western startups trying to enter markets in China, Japan and Korea. David Li is a developer of social networking applications such as Growing Gifts, and he also was the developer of OnChat, an early in-browser graphical avatar chat system. Richard Yu is a Seattle native living in China, where he consults for Shanghai-based web startups while writing his blog.

TextboxList turns normal textboxes into a widget which can be navigated with the keyboard, effectively turning your input into a “list” of items that can be easily deleted. It comes with an official Autocomplete plugin.

With its recent redesign and a slew of new features, Facebook has been moving to make Pages a focal point of the site. Personally, I recently described these changes as “the business model that moves [the company] from a successful social network to a highly profitable business.

With its recent redesign and a slew of new features, Facebook has been moving to make Pages a focal point of the site. Personally, I recently described these

A lot of what I've been working on the past two years has been built on the assumption that the model that social networks use today will fundamentally change. Social networks have largely been built on the premise of being walled gardens in such a way that users can't communicate or share content or friends across networks; put simply this is what keeps a Facebook user from being able to send a message to a MySpace user.

Evaluation: Students will be graded on the RBBEAW* system, developed to assess and score students based on their own relative merit.
A+ = 100–90
A = 89–80
A- = 79–70
A-- = 69–60
A--- = 59–50
A---- = 49–0

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.
Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness.

Social Media has slowly evolved not only as a new content publishing, sharing, and discovery medium, but more importantly as a peer-to-peer looking glass into the real world conversations that affect the perception, engagement, and overall direction of the brands we represent.
Socialized media didn't invent "conversations," it simply organized and amplified them.

Gitig: Blog site about social networks and such. He did that cool petal graphic of the social media landscape.

I rolled up the autocomplete plugin (Rein + Yehuda) of my last few posts with the Facebook style text list (Guillermo) of my autobox post. We’re calling it Autobox2: click here to see the demo.
Then, download it:
jquery.ui.autobox-0.7.1.zip Updated 12/11 (see comments)
jquery.ui.autobox-0.7.0.zip
Although it is missing some of the behavior of autobox1, it’s a more solid and extendable implementation. It also fixes what is in my mind the most glaring problem of autobox1, the fact that it needed the entire list in the initial ajax call. Autobox2 makes AJAX calls the same way that the autocomplete one does, makes a server call with the current contents of the input box. This is the way you would expect. I will no longer be releasing any more changes to Autobox1 and you can consider it deprecated. (I’ve noted this on the main Autobox1 post.)
As to the implementation, it is based on the Rein and Yehuda’s autocomplete plugin as detailed in 2 previous posts. There were a few things borrowe

Ekachai and Menck see it as their responsibility to teach students about Twitter because social media knowledge is becoming essential to their future fields - communications, advertising, public relations and marketing.

Marketers need to really embrace the fact that it's peers and their data, rather than brand, that will become the primary way we make decisions. The greatest rewards will go to those who embrace and participate in as many communities as they possibly can in credible ways.

Today online shopping

Second Life was digital marketing's Vietnam.
Communities come and go. Hubs seem to lose their innovation edge just as consumers grow more fickle, new venues emerge and viable monetization options remain scarce. If history repeats itself, Facebook and Twitter will one day be replaced by something else. However, this time it will be the open web.

News organizations have done an admirable job of recapping the first 100 days of the Obama administration. But rarely do we stumble across a primary source like Barack Obama's own Facebook feed. Scroll down for the full story.

The Photos application is one of Facebook’s most popular features. Up to date, users have uploaded over 15 billion photos which makes Facebook the biggest photo sharing website. For each uploaded photo, Facebook generates and stores four images of different sizes, which translates to a total of 60 billion images and 1.5PB of storage. The current growth rate is 220 million new photos per week, which translates to 25TB of additional storage consumed weekly. At the peak there are 550,000 images served per second. These numbers pose a significant challenge for the Facebook photo storage infrastructure.
NFS photo infrastructure
The old photo infrastructure consisted of several tiers:
* Upload tier receives users’ photo uploads, scales the original images and saves them on the NFS storage tier.
* Photo serving tier receives HTTP requests for photo images and serves them from the NFS storage tier.
* NFS storage tier built on top of commercial storage appliances.
Since each ima

Since each image is stored in its own file, there is an enormous amount of metadata generated on the storage tier due to the namespace directories and file inodes. The amount of metadata far exceeds the caching abilities of the NFS storage tier, resulting in multiple I/O operations per photo upload or read request. The whole photo serving infrastructure is bottlenecked on the high metadata overhead of the NFS storage tier, which is one of the reasons why Facebook relies heavily on CDNs to serve photos. Two additional optimizations were deployed in order to mitigate this problem to some degree:

K-I-S-S: Keep It Simple, Stupid. It’s a mantra that always pops into my head when I’m looking at new startups. A lot of them seem to want to do a million different things because other companies have been successful at one of those things in the past. But that’s a bad idea. Way too many new products and services are too complicated. And I would suggest, often fail as a direct result of that.

A great article on simple design and how it just...works.

is that it was so much neater, cleaner — yes, simpler. But with an explosion in growth, came an explosion in features. And, in turn, an explosion in complexity.

K-I-S-S: Keep It Simple, Stupid. It’s a mantra that always pops into my head when I’m looking at new startups

I liked this article -- particularly the part about Google Labs (so true about how to add new features)

Skype does not get the respect it deserves, because eBay not only publicly admitted to overpaying for it but is making a mess of its core business. Another reason may be that Skype flies in the face of conventional Valley wisdom that says it has to be all about social media. Or maybe the fact that Skype came from Europe, and we all know that Europeans are just lunch-eating dilettantes. Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion (yes, "t" for trillion) market, should get more respect.

10 Resons why Skype is here to stay.

Whatever the reason, a company that has $500 million in revenue, is profitable and growing, and has a shot at becoming the largest player in what is now a $2 trillion, should get more respect.

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest homepage design. The post attracted tons of feedback, most of which agreed with the sentiment that the new homepage is less personal, less informative, and less attractive to application users and developers.

YOU might not love the new Facebook, but brands should ~via @mashable http://bit.ly/gQdt [from http://twitter.com/sbeckham/statuses/1355500301]

brands should love new facebook

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest

Users aside though, there is one audience that appears to be benefitting greatly from Facebook’s new design: brands. Not only are Facebook Pages – the network’s competitive play against celebrity Twitter (Twitter reviews) users – revamped and more social, but their updates are taking up space on member’s homepages, and in turn, as our data shows, driving lots of traffic and engagement for brands.

What started as a place for students to socialize is now a cross-generational, location-agnostic meeting place that at once keeps us in touch with our second grade buddies, distant relatives and closest friends. But just how prominent is Facebook in our culture? We’ve gathered together a number of metrics that illustrate the growth and cultural saturation Facebook currently enjoys.

numbers on how often Facebook is mentioned online and how fast it's membership is growing

A lot is happening on Facebook. Not only are your friends telling the world what's going on in their lives, but the social network itself is changing. It's more open now than before, thanks to the Facebook Connect program, and there are several good products that let you see Facebook data in new ways. You don't have to use Facebook.com to use Facebook anymore. Here are some of the best desktop applications.
The newbies: AIR apps
Seesmic for Facebook
An Adobe AIR app, Seesmic for Facebook (news) uses Facebook Connect to let you update your status and view friend status updates without surfing to the Facebook site. It's in beta testing, but it works as advertised: updating status is quick and easy, and whenever a friend updates their own status, it's there for me to see. It's a little buggy, but it was just released.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is one of the most popular Twitter desktop clients, and now the app's developers are vying for Facebook dominance too. The upcoming version of TweetDe

A lot is happening on Facebook. Not only are your friends telling the world what's going on in their lives, but Facebook itself is changing. It's more open now than before, thanks to the Facebook Connect program, and there are several good products that let you see Facebook data in new ways. You don't have to use Facebook.com to use Facebook anymore. Here are some of the best apps.

This is a jQuery plugin to allow users to select multiple items from a predefined list, using autocompletion as they type to find each item. You may have seen a similar type of text entry when filling in the recipients field sending messages on facebook.

Could Firefox compete with Facebook in the social scene? Or could Facebook compete against Firefox in the browser arena?

Firefox doesn't keep track of the number of users it has but Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, said today that the company estimates that there are ...

"It's only logical to extrapolate from that analysis that the line between browsers and social networks will become much less clear and the two types of software will very likely compete with each other."

The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.

According to the researchers, "short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days' work, and as a result, increased productivity." More importantly, "firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos, using social networking sites or shopping online under the pretence that it costs millions in lost productivity." Someone should let them know their logic is flawed.

Today we are excited to announce an important step toward greater openness through Facebook Platform. For the first time, we're opening the core Facebook product experience -- the stream -- with the new Facebook Open Stream API.
The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what's going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream, anywhere. As a Facebook developer you'll also be able to access the stories you've published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it's on a mobile device, Web site or desktop, for users however you choose.
To enable developers to access the stream, we've built the Facebook Open Stream API in part using the emerging Activity Streams standard. Over the last several months, we've been collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about Activit

Facebook just opened up 200 million activity streams to developers: http://bit.ly/1aflgR Kudos on activity stream standards support. [from http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe/statuses/1631797834]

I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend”-based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It’s a lovely social network.
But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say “yes” to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t scale.
I don’t mind if anyone in the world reads my reviews, and they are in fact all public on the site, but for someone to “follow” my reviews (get notified when I write them), they have to be accepted as my friend, in

at O'Reilly Radar — funny... I said this over a year ago... ;-)

Asymmetric follow is why I use Twitter regularly and Facebook much less often. With Twitter’s model, I can find people I’m interested in, whether or not they know me, and learn about them and their lives and thoughts.

"I don’t mind if anyone in the world reads my reviews, and they are in fact all public on the site, but for someone to “follow” my reviews (get notified when I write them), they have to be accepted as my friend, in which case I see all their reviews as well." Asymmetric follow = RSS/Atom, basically. :) this is not a bad thing.

have been working hard on Photo Finder, a powerful tool for finding pictures of you and your friends on Facebook. This application is the fastest, most powerful and most accurate facial recognition outside of TV crime dramas.

It Begins: "Staffers at The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday were given a newly compiled list of rules for "professional conduct," which included a lengthy guide for use of online outlets, noting cautions for activities on social networking sites. In an e-mail to employees, Deputy Managing Editor Alix Freedman wrote, "We've pulled together into one document the policies that guide appropriate professional conduct for all of us in the News Departments of the Journal, Newswires and MarketWatch. Many of these will be familiar.""

* Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending. FAIL

Oh, was I happy when I saw this title today? Yes, very. Does it simplify my social media routine? Nope. But their advice is not bad: say less and make it meaningful, read less and scan more to get to those really juicy things you need and like, be friends with the people who like you and don't forget to manage your time. That's what my grandma is telling me since I was 8.

Poor Twitter! It may be the hottest service on the Web, but itâ€™s also profoundly misunderstood. Lots of people cheerfully admit they donâ€™t get it. Others emphatically believe things about it that arenâ€™t true.

I donâ€™t claim to understand everything there is to understand about Twitter. (If you donâ€™t understand that itâ€™s impossible to fully understand Twitterâ€¦well, then you donâ€™t understand Twitter.) I have, however, formed some strong opinions about what I call Twitter mythperceptions. After the jump, my stab at addressing ten of â€˜em.

"Like novels, magazines, and movies, Twitter is a judgment-neutral container. Some people fill it with garbage, others with wonderful stuff."

"I encounter confusion over Twitter every day, especially in the real world as I chat with folks who have either never used it, or have tried it and then walked away."

"To all who asked questions about Twitter: average teens don't use Twitter. They may in the future, but they do not now. Those who do are early adopters and not representative of any mainstream teen practice. Because of Oprah and celebs, some teens are starting to hear about it, but they don't understand it and they aren't using it."

This webinar will be a resource for non-profits and other organizations for social good. Expanding on the Non-Profits on Facebook page, we want to help you harness the power of Facebook and bring positive change to the world. Facebook empowers non-profits by enabling them to mobilize communities, organize events, increase fundraising, reduce costs with free online tools, and raise awareness through viral networks.

NTEN offered a fantastic Webinar today featuring Randi Zuckerberg, Director of Marketing at Facebook and Adam Conner from the DC Office on the emerging best practices for nonprofits who want to set up Facebook Fan Pages. Here's the description This...

"We want to encourage you to experiment. Let's be honest, takes an effort to build a community
Just because Facebook is free doesn't mean it is easier to get a million fans. Don't start from scratch - look at the other groups that are already talking about your cause and experiment or piggy back or do cross promotion."

Facebook Pages, which let people become “fans” of their favorite brands, people, and places - have become an important piece of the social media strategy for lots of companies. But how do you measure how well the effort is performing? Raw number of fans is one way, but more important than that are the actual growth rates your Facebook Page is showing.

Tool to measure fan growth

MUST READ THIS

RT @mashable: What Are the Top Performing Brands on Facebook? ( http://zz.gd/bc3ff4 ) [from http://twitter.com/jcookaz/statuses/1152520266]

There was a time when having a dotcom was key to your brand. The URL you pointed everyone to in all of your marketing. But with the emergence of the social web, and opportunities to engage with fans elsewhere, is that the right strategy?

There once was a time when our Facebook (Facebook reviews) friends wanted nothing to do with our Twitter (Twitter reviews) updates. Now that Twitter is growing at an astounding rate and rounding the mainstream bend, more of our Facebook friends have developed a fancy for Twitter themselves, and it’s becoming commonplace to highlight our tweets on our Facebook walls.

twitter and facebook

I've been asked about why/how I'm active in many socialmedia at once. here are 5 tools that expedite distribution across your socialnets.

Just as Bill Clinton destroyed the idea that marijuana use was a disqualifier to serious work, the increasing volume of personal life online will come to mean that, even though there’s a picture from when your head was on fire that one time, you can still get a job.

There seems no part of public, private or commercial life that hasn’t been made more accessible through social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Hospitals are posting videos of surgeries on YouTube and doctors are sending tweets from operating rooms to educate the public and market their services. Those are just the latest examples of media-driven communication in places that used to be relatively private.
Is there such a thing as overuse of social networking tools? In the online world, is the notion of a public/private divide simply not applicable?
* Clay Shirky, Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U
* Timothy B. Lee, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy
* Susan Mernit, former AOL vice president and blogger
* David E. Meyer psychology professor, University of Michigan

>> And the press are already struggling enough - God knows they've already lost their grip on news to some extent. If they lose their grip on comment and gossip and being a free PR machine as well, they're really in trouble. <<

Stephen Fry speaks to BBC Radio 4's Analysis about why he believes the web is such a wondrous thing.

As is usually the case with Our Lord Stephen Fry - ne'er was a truer word spoke about that place we spend our days and nights - the internet

Stephen Fry on living with the internet, and enjoying it.

Stephen Fry - wit, writer, raconteur, actor and quiz show host - is also a self-confessed dweeb and meistergeek. As he confesses "If I added up all the hours I've sat watching a progress bar fill up, I could live another life." His feed on the social networking site Twitter is one of the most popular in the world. He spoke to BBC Radio 4's Analysis about why he believes the web is such a wondrous thing.

With Oprah showcasing Twitter recently to her millions of soccer moms, and other traditional media taking notice, I’m guessing that people who are not big users of technology, either your mom or relatives, have recently asked you like they have asked me, “What is the big deal about Twitter? Is it just a fad or is it really impacting how we interact and use the web? And if the latter, in what ways?”
Below are the three areas where Twitter, in its rise as the next great social media site, is I think beginning to dethrone (or at least impact) several of the major players and technologies in the game.

twitter-dethroning-old-guard twitter mashable.com 1

Don't you just love disruption? How Twitter is Dethroning the Old Guard: http://bit.ly/1aBjms [from http://twitter.com/markivey/statuses/1679672014]

Mr. Pitts's experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

huge huge resource here

Mr. Pitts's experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses

Mr. Pitts Lacks a Mailing Address But He's Got a Computer and a Web Forum

Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they're beginning to have about our online friendships

Practically every hand we shake and every business card we exchange can lead to an invitation, sometimes within minutes, for a "friendship" on LinkedIn or Facebook.
What do these relationships say about us and the people in our networks? Companies armed with rich new data and powerful computers are beginning to explore these questions. They're finding that digital friendships speak volumes about us as consumers and workers, and decoding the data can lead to profitable insights.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that your organization should have a social media policy, and one of the things I heard among all the great comments was: “Okay, but what should it say?”
There are generally two approaches to social media policy making. Some organizations handle social media in an evolutionary way. Chad Houghton, the director of e-media and business development at the Society for Human Resource Management, told me that he thinks, “it might be beneficial not to create some arbitrary rules without first seeing where the opportunities and risks really are.”
Other organizations, meanwhile, feel more comfortable establishing a clear policy from the outset. IBM, for example, has published their social media guidelines publicly for anyone to read. It’s a great policy, though rather long.
Whether you’re writing your social media policy from the get-go, or letting it develop organically in reaction to situations as they arise, here are 10 things you should definitely consider. These

A year ago we modeled out the true value of various social networks based on the idea that users in high-value online advertising markets like Japan, the UK and the U.S. were worth more (financially speaking) than those in lower value online advertising markets. Facebook had recently become the largest worldwide social network in terms of users, but based on our model MySpace was still by far the most valuable social network.
We’ve now remodeled social network valuations based on current user numbers and Facebook’s most recent $10 billion valuation. The results are dramatically different.

Modeling The True Value Of Social Networks: 2009 Edition

The new model takes into account the dramatic rise of Facebook usage over the last year, the massive recent decline in MySpace usage, and less dramatic changes in the other social networks. We’ve also modeled out the various valuations with the old Bebo ($850 million) and LinkedIn ($1 billion) valuations as pivot points. We’ve also added Twitter to the list just for kicks.

social network model

recent data and modeling by TechCrunch - turns out MySpace still worth more than Facebook

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

"From the beginning of Facebook, people have used their real names to share and connect with the people they know. This authenticity helps to create a trusted environment because you know the identity of the people and things on Facebook. The one place, though, where your identity wasn't reflected was in the Web address for your profile or the Facebook Pages you administer. The URL was just a randomly assigned number like "id=592952074." That soon will change.
We're planning to offer Facebook usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with you. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future."

Twitter isn't the fashion statement it was ...last week. Facebook and YouTube both show continual growth, but Twitter's has leveled off. Evidently, it's utility is limited, ultimately by the platform itself. Designers can only expand on the concept of microblogging so far, and Twitter suffers from some pernicious faults--the number of people one follows is inversely proportional to the amount of time one must spend browsing their tweets. People get tired of spending their lives on Twitter, whereas other popular sites are more conducive to leisurely browsing.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

Here is a sample of sites that are live with Facebook Connect. Check out these examples as you think about how to integrate into your own site. When your site is live, feel free to edit this page and add a link to it here.

1. Create a Facebook Page Your Facebook Page should be the “hub” of your Facebook marketing presence. With a Facebook Page, Facebook users can become a “fan” of your company or product; when that happens, your name and logo will appear on their profile page and your name will appear in their profile feed. fbmarketingpages1In turn, more users will be able to discover your Facebook Page through their friends’ profiles and Facebook searches, and your Page can grow “virally” without you even having to do much work. Finally, Pages rank very highly in Google search results, boosting your SEO rankings.

When learning professionals (and others) want to create a free social network, social learning space or collaborative group for their students or employees, they often ask which platform is recommended. It is usually a matter of "horses for courses" so here is a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the three free main platforms: Facebook, Ning and Elgg.

When learning professionals (and others) want to create a free social network, social learning space or collaborative group for their students or employees, we are often asked which platform we recommend. It is usually a matter of "horses for courses" so we have drawn up this comparison of what we perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of the three free main platforms: Facebook, Ning and Elgg

Speculation on opening status updates up to the public and making them available to trolling search engines.

Reading: The Day Facebook Changed: Messages to Become Public By Default http://bit.ly/18mi52 [from http://twitter.com/sandroalberti/statuses/2348881447]

Wow, Facebook profiles are going public by default.

One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user's approved friends.

One of the most anticipated days in the history of social networking site Facebook has finally come: the company announced today that it has begun making status messages, photos and videos visible to the public at large by default instead of being visible only to a user's approved

Don’t look now, but the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled.

Don’t look now, but the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. Developers and marketers may want to think about how to serve this group of new users.

Looking at Facebook US audience growth over the last 180 days, it’s clear that Facebook is seeing massive increases in adoption amongst users 35-65. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is still women over 55 - there are now nearly 1.5 million of them active on Facebook each month.

Discussion of the migration of myspace users to facebook, explores the way class, race, and social lines are distributed across social networking sites

fascinating look at social networks and class structure

social networking

"...increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation 'choice' leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions."

With the recent update to Facebook Pages, many brands and businesses will be left wondering how they can best take advantage of this upgrade. The Advance Guard has collected some ideas and tips into a white paper that can now be freely downloaded and shared under a Creative Commons license.

This week we saw the release of Chris Anderson's book Free and reviews from the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell) and the Financial Times. I'd like to talk a bit about the firestorm that freeconomics (fed by Chris' book) has unleashed...

"Earlier this week, we spoke to several sources who each have some insight into Facebook's financials (none of them know precisely). Taking the sources' input together, we'd estimate the company's expected 2009 revenue this way:
* $125 million from brand ads
* $150 million from Facebook's ad deal with Microsoft
* $75 million from virtual goods
* $200 million from self-service ads.
"

Cassandra is a hybrid non-relational database in the same class as Google's BigTable. It is more featureful than a key/value store like Dynomite, but supports fewer query types than a document store like MongoDB. Cassandra was started by Facebook and later transferred to the open-source community. It is an ideal runtime database for web-scale domains like social networks.

Today 110 million Americans, or 60% of the online population, use social networks, and that number is fairly conservative, because instead of counting unique users or everyone who has an account, as many estimates do, the Anderson study counted only people who have used a social network at least once in the past month.

For example, Facebook users tend to be old, white, and rich. MySpace users are young...and fleeing. Other info is new: Twitterers are more likely to have a part-time job, LinkedIn users like to exercise and own more gadgets.

A new study by Anderson Analytics looks into the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn with a goal of providing marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

Facebook has certainly garnered a lot of attention these past weeks- first with it’s new vanity URL feature and then with it’s changed privacy features.
Facebook’s vanity URL feature - particularly for Facebook pages - is of particular interest to businesses. As Facebook continues it’s explosive growth heading towards 250 million active users, more and more businesses are hoping to leverage Facebook for serious business purposes. Facebook’s new feature allows businesses to create a custom url for their business page - something that wasn’t possible until now. (If you haven’t gotten your custom name, read Facebook expert Mari Smith’s post: How To Secure Your Facebook Username (Vanity URL).)
Want to sharpen your skills and learn how to really leverage Facebook to grow your business?
Below I’ve put together a comprehensive collection of resources, tips and advice on how to use Facebook for business purposes including:
1. General Guides, Tutorials and Help
2. Facebook Pages an

Universities are constantly exploring new ways to use social media to fulfill their missions of engaging and sharing knowledge with their constituents. Below are just 10 highlights of how universities are using social media for public affairs. As always, please share other examples you have used or come across in the comments below.

Real-time Web search (of streams of activities) is a hot topic right now. Everyone, including Google and Microsoft, recognizes the value of using trusted contacts as filters. What was once called social search is now called real-time search, but this time it will really happen. First, it will be applied to streams and then to the Web in general.

Here is an idea so obvious that it is surprising Twitter has not implemented it already: front-load search results with people you follow. When you search for, say, "Wilco" on Twitter today, the results are in the chronological order. That is not really relevant because you do not know who most of these people are. But if instead you could see people you follow, the search results would be much more useful.

Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson," a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic."

Well written article... seems Social Networking has REALLY come of age. it was TMZ and Twitter that turned to for the "scoop." Just natural evolution of how things work these days. The loss of Michael Jackson is like the loss of Princess Diana, it seems we lost 2 super gems, and got a lesson about the loss (and mauling) of innocence as well as the seductive destructive aspect of acumulating fame and riches. sad sad sad.

Just wanted to add that even though there is a single point of failure the reliability due to software bugs has not been an issue and the dfs Namenode has been very stable. The Jobtracker crashes that we have seen are due to errant jobs - job isolation is not yet that great in hadoop and a bad query from a user can bring down the tracker (though the recovery time for the tracker is literally a few minutes). There is some good work happening in the community though to address those issues.

I few weeks ago, I posted about a conversation I had with Jeff Hammerbacher of Cloudera, in which he discussed a Hadoop-based effort at Facebook he previously directed. Subsequently, Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sarma of Facebook contacted me to expand upon and in a couple of instances correct what Jeff had said. They also filled me in on Hive, a data-manipulation add-on to Hadoop that they developed and subsequently open-sourced.

"Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network. That handily beats out email (11.1 percent) and Twitter (Twitter) (10.8 percent), making the world’s most popular social network also the most popular service for sharing content."

How do you know which social sites are most popular? Aside from looking at the raw traffic numbers, a good indicator is data about which sites are seeing the

Facebook - 24%
Email -11%
Twitter - 11%

"According to AddToAny, Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network. That handily beats out email (11.1 percent) and Twitter (10.8 percent), making the world’s most popular social network also the most popular service for sharing content. This is undoubtedly welcome news at Facebook, as the site continues to emphasize sharing and readies its own real-time search engine."

According to AddToAny, a company that provides Web publishers tools to let their users share content, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service -- including, to our surprise, email.

via passitalong Quote: Report in the Silicon Alley Insider on why people share online. Shows how Facebook is a preferred method but twitter gaining on them quickly and with far fewer users.

In a recent study by Anderson Analytics, the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn were revealed. The ultimate goal was to provide marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today. Here we'll delve into the details about the specific networks studied.

In a recent study by Anderson Analytics, the demographics and psychographics of social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn were revealed. The ultimate goal was to provide marketers with information about users' interests and buying habits as related to their network of choice. The end result is a detailed look at the profiles and habits of social networking users on the web today.

As we've heard before, Facebookers are older and better off. They are more likely to be married (40%), white (80%) and retired (6%) than users of the other social networks. They have the second-highest average income ($61,000) and an average of 121 connections.
In general, there is no one area of interest for this group of social networkers. Out of 45 categories, national news, sports, exercise, travel, and home and garden skewed only slightly higher than the rest. This is likely because this network has the most users and contains a high number of users within each demographic.
Facebookers are also extremely loyal: 75% say Facebook is their favorite site and 59% say they've increased their use in the past 6 months. - via Paula Sanchez

Celebrities like Martha Stewart and Bill Gates might find Facebook (Facebook) high maintenance, but the world’s largest social networking site can be invaluable to journalists. Facebook gives reporters a means to connect with communities involved with stories, find sources, and generate leads. For media companies, Facebook is a way to build community and reach a larger audience.

"We're getting to a point if you're not responding, you're not being seen as an authentic type of brand," says Mr. Brown.

A growing number of businesses are tracking social-media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to gauge consumer sentiment and avert potential public-relations problems.
Ford Motor Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co., among others, are deploying software and assigning employees to monitor Internet postings and blogs. They're also assigning senior leaders to craft corporate strategies for social media.

FOR BLOG POST: Les cas d'une veille réussie

wing number of businesses are tracking social-media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to gauge consumer sentiment and avert potential public-relations problems.

After four surveys of active internet users, a group whose total estimated global audience is now 625 million (or one in thirteen of people worldwide!), UM found that the usage of social networks is on the rise.

Universal McCann has released a new report that looks at the state of social media today. Apparently, this trend is showing no sign of slowing down. In fact, it's still growing.

Why were Twitter and Facebook down for much of August 7, 2009? It looks like it was a denial of service attack... aimed at just a single person. Probably not a good strategy - taking out the network to silence an individual - because it mobilizes so many resources to fix the problem (people wouldn't care so much if just a single account was hacked). But still interesting.

"Lots of big brands are embracing social media, but which platform is most popular? At least as far as Fortune 100 companies go, Twitter (Twitter) easily takes the top spot, according to a recent study from PR firm Burson-Marsteller. "

Lots of big brands are embracing social media, but which platform is most popular? At least as far as Fortune 100 companies go, TwitterTwitter easily takes the top spot, according to a recent study from PR firm Burson-Marsteller.

Lots of big brands are embracing social media, but which platform is most popular? At least as far as Fortune 100 companies go, TwitterTwitter easily takes the

The past few weeks have come with two major reveals for the weirdos who follow online social networks. The first was big news. Twitter’s internal documents leaked and the identity-crisis of earth’s most popular start-up is now public. The second was more under the radar but just as important. In a memo that went out to staff, the CEO of MySpace admitted that their users are caught between three competing notions of what MySpace is or should be.

Facebook was one of the first social networks to emphasize genuine identity insofar as they required full names, university email addresses, and deleted accounts that used aliases. The second was pragmatic. Facebook launched in a single target market. In this case, of course, it was Harvard.
What this enabled was a less abstract more manageable mission. Instead of having to define what an ‘online social networking space’ was supposed to be for everyone, Zuckerburg just had to answer for Harvard.

The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed (Updated) by Jason Kincaid on August 10, 2009. Includes interview.

Presumably FriendFeed will end up being incorporated into FB interface?
At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates

"Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.
At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates."

In continuing with my series of quick social media tips (check out 5 tips for LinkedIn) I’m covering some tips for business use of Facebook here. I’ve actually written about some of these tips in great detail before, but this can act as a quick primer for folks who like their info snack sized like this

In continuing with my series of quick social media tips (check out 5 tips for LinkedIn) I'm covering some tips for business use of Facebook here. I've actually

Cloud computing means you can store your data in web applications and access it from any browser, anywhere—but that doesn't mean you don't need a backup plan. Safeguard your data when a storm's a-brewing in the cloud with these tools.
Next time your favorite web site is down or you're locked out of an account, make sure you've got the crucial info you need where you can get to it: on your computer.

Ask anybody why they use Facebook, and most people will respond with reasons like staying in touch with friends, or being able to share pictures. Rarely does one’s professional life ever get mentioned when describing the social network. When it comes to business networking, LinkedIn (LinkedIn) tends to take all the thunder, and Facebook (facebook) is generally written off as a place just for fun. Yet, perhaps that’s a mistake.

Ask anybody why they use Facebook, and most people will respond with reasons like staying in touch with friends, or being able to share pictures. Rarely does one’s professional life ever get mentioned when describing the social network. When it comes to business networking, LinkedIn tends to take all the thunder, and Facebook is generally written off as a place just for fun. Yet, perhaps that’s a mistake.
Facebook, after all, has 250 million active users compared to about 44 million for LinkedIn, and even though the atmosphere is clearly not as focused on business, there are still a ton of opportunities for professional networking that business users would be remiss to pass up. Once you look beyond the obvious social features like sharing pictures and poking friends, there are plenty of ways to tap into the professional community on the world’s largest social network.

is the time right for distributed net as Dave Winer sugests?
links to various tools that could be really useful

"Maybe it's better to host your own. That's the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users who have published their content online only to see the tools they use become broken or less desirable." One word (camelCased): BuddyPress.

While I’m currently in the midst of writing my next book, I stumbled across some very interesting and useful statistics that offer a glimpse into Facebook behavior and activity as well as the state of the Facebook platform. I believe that they reinforce many of our hunches and assumptions and also introduce facts that may alter the ingredients of your next Social Media initiative.

Shot at SXSW While I'm currently in the midst of writing my next book, I stumbled across some very interesting and useful statistics that offer a glimpse

Everything You Never Knew About Facebook

Quite an interesting list of facts. "30 million users update their statuses at least once each day" Some of these users say they would never Twitter.

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely and privately show content to your friends and family, or blog the photos and videos you take with a cameraphone.

Here are 10 things you must do to earn the trust of your online audience. While written from a crowdfunding perspective, this advice applies to anyone working in social media.

Lincoln once said, “With the public trust, anything is possible. Without it, nothing is possible”. Social media is now a daily activity that millions of people around the world consume and participate in. This is the first time in human history that anyone, no matter who you are or where you are has an opportunity to create, share, and prosper, and if you’re going to succeed and stand out in a heavily crowded social media ocean, you need to earn your audience’s trust.

create beautiful Facebook visualizations of your own with very little effort. Enjoy!

This Facebook add-on lets you easily create 3D graphical representations of the connections in your Facebook network. You can also view graphs for other users, fine tune the settings to create various graphs, zoom and pan your graph, and choose between a light and a dark theme. The results can be stunning, especially for users with a lot of Facebook friends.

Earlier this week, Facebook promised a number of changes to appease user concerns about the latest homepage re-design. Users have been noticing these improvements being pushed live to their homepage over the last day or so, and this morning, I finally got them enabled on my account. After doing a bit of tweaking, I’m definitely enjoying my Facebook homepage more than I was the past couple weeks with version 1 of the redesign. I thought I’d share with you a few of these tweaks - designed primarily to reduce information overload - so you can try them on your own account, unless of course you’re happy with the new, new Facebook as-is.

40% of tweets are “pointless babble.” It begets the question, “What then makes a quality tweet?” Informative, humorous, personal, inspiring.

"The answer to this, in fact, may determine the long-term success of Twitter (Twitter). As a completely user-generated content website, the quality of its content is, well, up to us users. " kort kategorisering af tweets...

It begets the question, “What then makes a quality tweet?”
The answer to this, in fact, may determine the long-term success of Twitter (Twitter). As a completely user-generated content website, the quality of its content is, well, up to us users. Sure, Twitter management can add or take away features and keep the site running, but whether a new user signs on to see pointless babble or quality content is solely and completely up to us!
Below are my four categories in which most high quality tweets I read fall under. But we’re most interested in what you think makes for an interesting Tweet: let us know in the comments.

The best tweets are informative, funny, personal, or inspiring -- or maybe all four.

Here is an app to allow logging in via twitter, facebook, openid, yahoo, google, which should work transparently with Django authentication system.

TL;DR version: Here is an app to allow logging in via twitter, facebook, openid, yahoo, google, which should work transparently with Django authentication system. (@login_required, User and other infrastructure work as expected.) Demo and Code.Longer version follow:

Are tweets copyrightable? This article by Brock Shinen who is a business, intellectual property and entertainment attorney argues that it isn't IF the content that you post via Twitter was not copyrighted to begin with. Facts are not copyrightable. There is also the amount of content that you take from an original work that plays an importance.

A seriously good article on whether you can copyright tweets. Short answer: no.

Short answer: no, with a but; long answer: yes, with a maybe.

'Many people believe they own everything they post online, be it Tweets, Facebook status, or whatever. The truth is that most people are most likely incorrect in their assumption.'

Marketers who closely follow social media can find some enticing statistics to justify their online strategies:
Facebook
More than 10,000 websites use Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users log in to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from those sites with their Facebook friends.
About 30 million Facebook members access it through mobile devices.
Twitter
Twitter users spend 66% more dollars on the Internet than non-Twitter users, says market researcher ComScore.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn has more than 365,000 company profiles. More than 12 million small-business professionals are members of LinkedIn.
MySpace
More than 1 million small businesses and individuals promote their goods and services on MySpace.

"Social-networking services increasingly are indispensable business tools, says Forrester Research. According to its survey of 1,217 business decision makers worldwide late last year, 95% use social networks to some extent. And 53% of more than 300 marketers planned to increase social-media marketing spending this year, according to a Forrester presentation in April."

Continued growth in social media and social networking use by big companies - Ford, Lenovo, Starbucks, etc.

"Social-networking services increasingly are indispensable business tools, says Forrester Research. According to its survey of 1,217 business decision makers worldwide late last year, 95% use social networks to some extent."

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years. I’ve broken the image (which is quite massive on its own) into a few chunks below, and you can download the whole thing here.

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it's easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million ...

Facebook Stats

Datos sobre Facebook.

Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown.

There’s an astonishing amount of information to be gleaned from mining the amazing real-time stream of information Twitter (Twitter) provides. Twitter search (tweetzi Twitter Search) is an extremely powerful way of turning up some of those answers. Even using only plain text queries can turn up lots of valuable information about what people are talking about right now.

There's an astonishing amount of information to be gleaned from mining the amazing real-time stream of information TwitterTwitter provides. Twitter

This article shines light on the possible downside of user generated content. The author of the article outlines how more and more employers are turning to the net in order to see how prospective employees represent themselves to the world. Many could argue that this indeed is an invasion of privacy but this seems to be the avenue that is readily available for use. This article links with history2.0 as it exposes how our media consumption habits are continually changing with certain forms of media now being phased out to make way for new advanced media with multiplatform databases. The website that the article is found in is a multi platform for user generated content and provides the links to further spread information to other users. This gives legitimacy to the facts brought forward in the article as the information would have come from within the website.

We all know that employers are getting savvy to social networking sites and the information we share online. But what you may not know is that a recently conducted survey shows that nearly 1 in 2 companies are doing their online due diligence for prospective job candidates.
This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

"open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and and tools that power FriendFeed"

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.

Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

All of this has potentially massive repercussions for how marketers view Facebook chatter. By really digging deep into how Facebook is searching internal content, you’ll be tapping into the next level of the web’s development, uncovering a gold mine of data about what people are talking about, what they like and dislike, and how they are influencing the opinions of others. This is clearly an important search frontier.

Facebook is one of those Web phenomena that impress everyone with numbers. To cite some: about 250 million users are on Facebook, and together they spend more than 5 billion minutes on Facebook… every day. These numbers suggest that we should start thinking about how to use Facebook for blogging or vice versa.

Journalism is supposed to be a conversation, but often news websites don’t provide the tools for that conversation to take place. Implementing social media tools and allowing readers to connect to the organization through Twitter, Facebook (Facebook) and other networks, can make it easier for users to engage with the news content and their community members. However, some fundamental tools that allow readers to share content through social media are not being utilized. A recent study that looked at almost 200 newspapers and TV stations with Twitter accounts found that only a third offered readers a way to share a story link using Twitter, while 80 percent provided a Facebook sharing button.

People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road.

5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook

When the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one ...

hen the President of the United States warns schoolchildren to watch what they say and do on Facebook, you know that we've got a problem...and it's not one limited to the U.S.'s borders, either. People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road. For example, did you know that 30% of today's employers are using Facebook to vet potential employees prior to hiring? In today's tough economy, the question of whether to post those embarrassing party pics could now cost you a paycheck in addition to a reputation. (Keep that in mind when tagging your friends' photos, too, won't you?)
But what can be done? It's not like you can just quit Facebook, right? No - and you don't have to either. You just need to take a few precautions.

Tech Director Jen Hegna over in the Byron (MN) schools developed this set of guidelines for the staff in her district. (She was motivated, she said, partially by posts here and here on the Blue Skunk. Cool!) Anyway she's given permission for me to share her work here and says readers are welcome to use and adopt as well:

Guidelines for teachers when posting to social network sites such as Facebook.

true. I have been very lazy about grouping on the various social services that I use.

Social interaction online is not very sophisticated. The news feed model of conversation has taken over the social web, from Facebook to Twitter to FriendFeed to MySpace, but by itself it doesn't serve us very well.

Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web http://bit.ly/UlWGP [from http://twitter.com/FredericMartin/statuses/1664171234]

@vindugoel on folowing thousands of people but getting value from it: http://bit.ly/9Nlho [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/1700230046]

Various services have different ways for users to separate their "friends" into different groups, viewable by topic, category or type of connection. By better understanding the value that groups can deliver, we can better strategise our creation of groups.

At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative."
MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information — because you don't have control over your information."

Using data from Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.
Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect.

The Nielsen report into Social Media growth between 2007 and 2008. Good stats about SM growth

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places.”

From Mashable.com - The latest: Facebook Fan Boxes, which lets Facebook Page admins embed the latest activity from their Page on their own website. Page admins will now see an “Add Fan Box to your site” link under the logo of their page. From there, they can cut and paste the code into their website, which will then display a widget containing that page’s latest updates, and optionally, pictures of fans. Additionally, Facebook users can become a fan of a Page right from the website the Box is embedded on.

Late Friday afternoon, Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Senior Editor Milton Coleman sent a memo to the staff with a social media policy—effectively immediately—aimed at staffers’ use of “individual accounts on online social networks, when used for reporting and for personal use.” The new policy was translated externally by WaPo ombudsman Andy Alexander on his blog, along with a worst-case illustration: the decision by Managing Editor Raju Narisetti, responsible for features and the web, to shut down what appears to have been a small Twitter account intended for a private audience of friends and associates (as private as something that goes to 90-ish people can be) after some of his comments were called into question.

Late Friday afternoon, Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Senior Editor Milton Coleman sent a memo to the staff with a social media policy—effectively immediately—aimed at staffers’ use of “individual accounts on online social networks, when used for reporting and for personal use.”

The Washington Post's social media guidelines for its journalists are thought by some to be a little on the stringent side...
"All Washington Post journalists relinquish some of the personal privileges of private citizens. Post journalists must recognize that any content associated with them in an online social network is, for practical purposes, the equivalent of what appears beneath their bylines in the newspaper or on our website."

Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, “social awareness streams,” and then took to examining user behavior.

80% of users are “meformers,” or “Me Now” status updaters.
Meformers are “people who use the platform to post updates on their everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts, and emotions.” The rest (20%) are informers who use the channels to share informational updates like links news articles. #Based on the categories and complex cluster analysis, the professors were able to lump Twitterers into one of two categories: meformers or informers. The former makes up 80% of the user base, while the latter a meager 20%. Interesting enough, though, the study also showed that the informers have significantly more friends and followers than their meformer counterparts. The median informer has 131 friends and 112 followers, while the median meformer has just 61 friends and 43 followers. # Informers have a higher proportion of mentions of other users in their messages (that is they @reply to more Twitterers)
- 25% of messages come from mobile phones

The Facebook Connect Wizard is just what it sounds like – a way to incorporate Facebook Connect into your website in three steps. Just enter in your URL, upload a file to your server so that Facebook Connect can talk to your site, and then find the social markup and integration tools you want to add on the backend of your site.

Over the last ten months, Facebook Connect has flourished as a tool to not only minimize login and sign-up minutiae, but to allow developers and content

What makes this all rather chilling is that I'm doing all of this via the application API. If your friend has installed an application, then it can access quite a lot of information about you, unless you turn it off. If your friend has granted the application the read_stream privilege, then it can read your status stream. Even if a friend of a friend has done this, and you comment on your friend's status entries, it's possible to infer your existence and retrieve those discussions through dark stalking.

Most recently, I've been able to obtain status feeds, even for users who have very tight privacy settings, although I had to tweak my own application's privileges to do so. I don't know how far into the past these go, but they also come with likes information, and comments. This gives me a wealth of information on the strength and types of relationships people have. A person who comments a lot on another user's posts probably finds that user interesting. If I descended into keyword and text analysis, I may even be able to determine how they find that user interesting.

Despite their reputation as early adopters, young people are not flocking to Twitter. But their parents are.

The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web...
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)

Affordable photo book printer now offers one free book per user per month, with a removable advertisement card to cover their costs.

Free photo books... interesting model: We have teamed up with select partners to sponsor one free book per month per customer, yes even the shipping and handling are free! Don't worry advertisements will NOT be on the same pages as your photos. All advertisements will be removable full page inserts. We are very very selective with our partners and will not include anything that is offensive. In fact we may include offers and brands that are very valuable to you. We also take your privacy very seriously and will not share any individual data with third parties. You will always have the option to pay for your books and we will not include any advertising. All offers from HotPrints limited are subject to change at any time without notification.

"acebook Pages may be taking the social network by storm, but they can take time and technical skill to set up. When you need to promote something quickly, or are looking to foster a stronger sense of community, the more traditional Facebook Group is often the way to go. While not as fancy as Pages, Groups offer many of the same features, with a slightly more streamlined look. This makes it easy for virtually anyone to create a Group, for any number of purposes, and get them live quickly—an important benefit in the time-sensitive social media sphere. However, the ease and speed with which a Group can be set up has created a lot of spammy or messy Groups that are slapped together in minutes and abandoned soon after. In order to break through the clutter and gain members, you need to take the time to set up a Group correctly. Here are a few tips:

Between search engines and social media, there are a lot of different ways that people can get to your website. But which of these sources provides loyal users that come back to your site multiple times?
That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.
According to their findings, FacebookFacebookFacebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.
In the realm of search engines, YahooYahoo!Yahoo! provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by GoogleGoogleGoogle and BingBingBing with around 12% each.

bing, digg, facebook, Google, statistics, twitter, Yahoo

Facebook Is the Most Valuable Source of Traffic [Stats]: Between search engines and social media, there are a l.. http://bit.ly/2lr3ER [from http://twitter.com/GoodMillwork/statuses/4659544733]

Here are 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you.

Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

Methods members of the Christmas Bureau can help spread the word socially

Quick explanation for those not familiar with Facebook Connect. It is a service developed by Facebook that lets Facebook users login into partner sites using

As of this writing, there are more than 15,000 registered implementations (websites, devices and applications) of Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008. According to Nick O’Neil from Allfacebook.com, the most recent statistics show that Facebook Connect is close to 1 million users. Impressive numbers given this initiative isn’t even a year old yet. Implementing this can be trivial, and offers immediate benefits to companies willing to experiment. Already we’re seeing these benefits on Connect enabled sites:

The case for integrating Facebook Connect into your site to improve communication and traffic.

Quick explanation for those not familiar with Facebook Connect. It is a service developed by Facebook that lets Facebook users login into partner sites using their Facebook account and share information with Facebook friends. Basically, a single sign

While you're in the air, MySkyStatus sends altitude, location, departure and arrival updates automatically to your Facebook and Twitter pages. It's travel made social and it's easy to set up. Let's get started.

AlertBox gives insight to how users interact with corporate streams. like Facebook, Twitter, and RSS.

According to a study of social networking postings, users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

Summary: Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.

Throughout the entire 2008 and the better part of 2009, we’ve reported on Facebook and Twitter’s explosive growth. Month after month, we’ve seen tremendous numbers from both these services, while some giants of old, such as MySpace, dropped lower and lower.
Somewhere in June, however, Twitter stopped growing, at least according to Compete. The same thing happened to Facebook (Facebook) at the exact same time; at first we’ve attributed the traffic numbers to the summer slumber, but now that Compete’s numbers for September are out, there’s no doubt that both Facebook and Twitter are no longer growing, at least in the eyes of the (admittedly US-centric) Compete.

Some people wonder if all this social networking is really making us more social — we’re just sitting in front of our computers, after all. But Facebook, the web’s largest social network, plays host to 3 million event listings each month. And these are offline events, ranging in size from small, friendly get-togethers, to company picnics, to enormous political protests.

"FriendFeed's web server is a relatively simple, non-blocking web server written in Python. [...] Tornado is an open source version of this web server and some of the tools we use most often at FriendFeed."
can handle 8000 reqs/s

Everyone knows that social networking sites are growing in popularity. Millions of individuals visit daily—or even more often. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.emarketer.com%2FArticle.aspx%3FR%3D1007210

Quite a jump in the last year for the 55+ demographic

Everyone knows that social networking sites are growing in popularity. Millions of individuals visit daily&mdash;or even more often.
According to the “Consumer Internet Barometer” report from TNS and

Everyone knows that social networking sites are growing in popularity. Millions of individuals visit daily—or even more often.

One of the biggest challenges for small businesses who want to market using social media is capacity. crowdSPRING is a small business - there are only 10 people on our team - so we understand this challenge well.
You must decide whether social media makes sense for your small business. There is no universal answer. In this two part series (part 2 will be published in a few days), I’ll offer 10 small business social media marketing tips. For each tip, I’ll discuss the basic strategy - for those who simply want to get their toes wet, and also the advanced strategy - for those who want to spend a bit more time and go a bit deeper in their social media marketing efforts. Where possible, I’ll point you to other excellent resources to help you execute your strategy. The tips are all based on my own experience leveraging social media marketing for crowdSPRING. I recommend only tools I’ve personally used - and third party references I trust.

What we do know is that more measurements need to be made, spread out over the next two to five years. According to Lieberman, the only way to predict how a social network will evolve is to construct an artificial one and track the flow of ideas within it. What is the likelihood of people forwarding on items that they receive in a social network such as Facebook (news items, links, video clips)? What is the likelihood of people responding to messages, or re-tweeting other people's tweets on Twitter? "The idea we need to explore is this: what is the likelihood that a particular stimulus within a social network leads to a particular response?" says Lieberman. "In my opinion, as we get better at measuring what happens within social networks, I predict a lot more organised marketing efforts on social networks as well as systematic influence campaigns."

What we do know is that more measurements need to be made, spread out over the next two to five years. According to Lieberman, the only way to predict how a social network will evolve is to construct an artificial one and track the flow of ideas within it.
What is the likelihood of people forwarding on items that they receive in a social network such as Facebook (news items, links, video clips)? What is the likelihood of people responding to messages, or re-tweeting other people's tweets on Twitter?
"The idea we need to explore is this: what is the likelihood that a particular stimulus within a social network leads to a particular response?" says Lieberman.
"In my opinion, as we get better at measuring what happens within social networks, I predict a lot more organised marketing efforts on social networks as well as systematic influence campaigns."

"Laura Parker: What can evolutionary graph theory teach us about the spread of ideas on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter?"

The evolving face of social networks
Laura Parker: What can evolutionary graph theory teach us about the spread of ideas on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter?

from the site: Article about Harvard graduate student Erez Lieberman, whose evolutionary graph theory is encouraging people to think about social networks in a different way: as an evolving population.

This guide is for using the Mu JavaScript library to access the above on your site. Mu is a very small library which you can use along with your favourite JavaScript library such as Dojo, jQuery, MooTools, Prototype or YUI.

annually on sales of virtual goods. Need a shotgun to do that next job on Mobsters? No problem. Pay with a credit card, paypal, or your mobile phone and it’s all yours. And people are obviously very willing to buy these virtual goods. Nothing new there.

Major media can’t stop applauding the companies long enough to understand what’s really going on with these games. The real story isn’t the business success of these startups. It’s the completely unethical way that they are going about achieving that success.

How young is too young for kids to be on facebook - the minimum age is 13 - but they have no way to verify how old kids who sign up actually are

Important article to read about children of all ages creating profiles. I believe this supports our driving need to incorporate instruction and discussion on this topic in schools. Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2009%2FTECH%2F11%2F02%2Fkids.social.networks

Researchers say a growing number of children are flouting age requirements on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, or using social-networking sites designed just for them.
Facebook and MySpace require users to be at least 13. But they have no practical way to verify ages, and many young users pretend to be older when signing up.
Some scientists worry that pre-adolescent use of the sites, which some therapists have linked to Internet addiction among adults, could be damaging to children's relationships and brains.

Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class.

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33, a good seven years older. That's an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

Young people and Twitter. SHOCK!

New average ages of social media users: Twitter 31, Facebook 33, LinkedIn 39, MySpace 26
According to a review of the newest Pew Internet report, average ages of the top social media sites are shifting and converging.

Demographics of social networks: Over the course of the year, there have been countless reports - some more substantial than others - but all with the same message: Generation Y is just not interested in Twitter. The reports generally cited members of this demographic as saying Twitter was "pointless" and "narcissistic."
Apparently, that's beginning to change. Well, maybe not their perception of Twitter, but certainly their use of it. Today, Twitter is now the second-youngest of the top four social networking sites. Its median age is 31. MySpace's is 26, LinkedIn is 39, and, as noted above, Facebook is 33.

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

his report adds new insights to an ongoing debate about the extent of social isolation in America. A widely-reported 2006 study argued that since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined, and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased. In particular, the study found that Americans have fewer close ties to those from their neighborhoods and from voluntary associations. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phone, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often

An interesting report on the changing landscape of social connections.

Can we get on Pew's press release list so we don't have to read about their studies in NY times?

Social media remains the hot topic of the digital world and I often get asked about the various statistics involved. This in itself is fairly difficult, as this particular online sphere is constantly shifting, evolving and growing at an astronomical rate. But I’ve pulled together some interesting (and hopefully useful) data for a couple of the bigger players in the market...

Social media remains the hot topic of the digital world and I often get asked about the various statistics involved. This in itself is fairly difficult, as this particular online sphere is constantly shifting, evolving and growing at an astronomical rate. But I’ve pulled together some interesting (and hopefully useful) data for a couple of the bigger players in the market...

Bam! Hits the nail on the head comparing TechCrunch to the NYT. Journalism is being done by those not the MSM.

Faced with their own demise, fearful of losing even more advertising, newspapers have made the huge mistake of becoming ever more timid, more cautious, more in bed with the companies they cover.

Every once in a while you get to see a mainstream outlet cover a story right alongside a blog, so you can put them up against each other and see why one was so much better than the other. This week TechCrunch and the New York Times (photo) provided just such a lesson.
The issue was a company called Zynga, which makes online games, like FarmVille, that have become incredibly popular on Facebook among people who are missing parts of their brains.

Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?

Interesting (somewhat provocative) analysis on the differences between the Techcrunch reporting on Zynga and scammy Facebook apps, and how the New York Times covered the same topic.

Um, New York Times? If you guys are still wondering why people are dropping their subscriptions and getting their news from blogs instead of you — this is why.
And to all those people who go around wringing their hands and saying what are we going to do when the “real newspapers” all die and we have to get our news from Gawker and HuffPo and TechCrunch? Friends, I think we’re going to be just fine.
Because time after time, blogs are simply beating the shit out of the newspapers. They’re the ones who still dare to go for the throat, while their counterparts at big newspapers just keep reaching for the shrimp cocktail.

Digital marketing company Razorfish has just launched its third annual FEED survey of 1,000 "connected consumers." The survey is focused on online consumer behavior. This year Facebook and ...

40% of People "Friend" Brands on Facebook

[Follow for the deals/discounts... instread of a love for them. Is that really so surprising?]
This year Facebook and Twitter feature prominently. 40% of respondents "friended" brands on Facebook, while 25% reported following brands on Twitter. What's more, Razorfish found that consumers access brands on Twitter and Facebook mainly for deals and promotions.

Microsoft Toolkit to enable .NET developers to quickly and easily leverage the various features of the Facebook Platform.

This toolkit is provided as a Facebook Client Library similar to Facebook's PHP Client Library or Facebook's JavaScript library. The goal is to enable .NET developers to quickly and easily leverage the various features of the Facebook Platform. This toolkit has evolved over time with input from the community and from Microsoft. The latest release (v3.0) includes new architectural improvements and provides an asynchronous interface for using the toolkit from Silverlight and from WPF.
The main entry point is the API (Facebook.Rest.Api) class in the Facebook.dll assembly. This class wraps the Facebook REST API and provides an easy to use interface for calling the different methods currently available in the Facebook API. We've also provided samples and tools for helping develop Facebook applications in the various .NET platforms including: ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and WinForms. Additionally, we've provided all the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples for you to exp

You're the owner of a local small business and you are trying to figure out the best steps to get on to Facebook to drive new customers. It can be a daunting task and with little extra time in the day, how can you be expected to spend time promoting your business on Facebook? I completely understa ...

Possible to build a site like FB.. using Tornado Cassandra, Hive (hadoop underneath) memcache, Scribe, Thrift.

Real-time updates have become an important aspect of the social Web that make it easier to share with friends. In March, we introduced a real-time News Feed to make the stream as relevant and engaging as possible for users. Similarly, FriendFeed, which we recently acquired, built their entire site to support real-time updates. It hasn't been easy to build and scale these features, so today we're open-sourcing a core piece of infrastructure called Tornado, which was originally developed by the FriendFeed team.
Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework written in Python, designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services. Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain. While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python (Django, Google's webapp, web.py), it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.

starting point for ressources about Tornado python based webserver and tools

g system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.
I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.
It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

Social media gets lots of attention these days. The NFL banned players from using Twitter. Bing integrated Twitter results into its search engine results pages (SERPs). When Michael Jackson died the site handled an estimated 5,000 tweets per minute and, proving Twitter's global reach, a state department official asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance due to the critical role the site played in the recent Iran elections.

Windows only: Fishbowl, the Facebook client demoed at Microsoft's introduction to Silverlight 4, is now available for download—and it adds quite a few new desktop features to the Facebook experience, including badges, a mini news feed, and more.

Facebook can play a crucial role in your blog’s growth as it is one of the largest social media network on the web. In this article we will be sharing some of the most valuable tips and tutorials that will let you utilize the power of Facebook and WordPress to your advantage.
We will organize this tutorial in the method from easiest to hardest, so bare with us.

In this article we will be sharing some of the most valuable tips and tutorials that will let you utilize the power of Facebook and WordPress to your advantage.

Non-consumer companies realize there are clear benefits to implementing a social media strategy, but what do they need to do to achieve success? The truth is, the social media strategy, processes, and principles, don’t really change much depending on your company type and size. Here are a few rules to live by when implementing your social media strategy.

2010 is going to be an incredible year for marketing. Now, of course I don’t have a crystal ball (or do I...insert creepy music here) but the shift is unmistakable and can't be ignored.
The days of hit and miss expensive marketing and advertisin

The explosion of social networking sites over the past decade has facilitated a transformation in the way we communicate with each other. Here we look at some of these communities with over 1 million users, both active and defunct.

What defines an exemplary social media campaign? What are the elements necessary to capture consumers' attention and bring about interest and participation in any given social media campaign? What are the best recent social media campaigns online? How can we measure the success of a social media campaign?

Have you ever wondered how many of Twitter’s users are women? Or men? What about Facebook, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, and other sites in the social media sphere?
We have tracked down this information for a number of social network sites (19 of them). All the major ones have been included, like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and also some of the most popular social news sites; Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

Kevin: The male-female ration on 19 social network sites including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Slashdot.

In summer 2005, having spent the best part of four decades building a newspaper, film and television empire, Rupert Murdoch decided that the time had come to get serious about the internet. As founder and chairman of News Corporation, one of the world’s biggest and most powerful media conglomerates, Murdoch controls an eclectic portfolio of businesses ranging from The Sun newspaper to the movie studio 20th Century Fox. Yet with young people “watching less television and reading fewer newspapers”, as he observed that summer, News Corp desperately needed a bigger presence online.

Summary of the Facebook architecture and the bottlenecks they have had to work around

After considering a variety of data clustering algorithms, found that there was very little win for the additional complexity of clustering. So at Facebook, user data is randomly partitioned across indiviual databases and machines across the cluster. Hence, each user access requires retrieving data corresponding to user state spread across hundreds of machines. Intra-cluster network performance is hence critical to site performance. Facebook employs memcache to store the vast majority of user data in memory spread across thousands of machines in the cluster. In essence, nodes maintain a distributed hash table to determine the machine responsible for a particular users data. Hot data from MySQL is stored in the cache. The cache supports get/set/incr/decr and

In conclusion, we at EFF are worried that today's changes will lead to Facebook users publishing to the world much more information about themselves than they ever intended.

The new changes are intended to simplify Facebook's notoriously complex privacy settings and, in the words of today's privacy announcement to all Facebook users, "give you more control of your information." But do all of the changes really give Facebook users more control over their information? EFF took a close look at the changes to figure out which ones are for the better — and which ones are for the worse.

Twitter’s march towards world domination continues apace. This morning comScore released its global numbers for March, 2009. Worldwide visitors to Twitter.com increased 95 percent in the month of March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to its estimates. This compares to 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. alone.

People from Google, MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, Nokia, Comcast" and startups met on January 8, 2009, to "discuss proposed standards for the future of 'activity streams'." Marshall Kirkpatrick analogizes standards to the railroads' standardization on gauge track.

Last week Facebook rolled out a new version of their privacy settings to all users. Privacy settings are something that many Facebook users are regularly confused about. That’s why we published our original Facebook privacy guide back in February. After millions of people visited our privacy guide, we realized how important privacy is to Facebook users. With the new settings rolled out, we thought that now would be a great time to update the guide with the latest changes.
In this guide we present a thorough overview of the most important privacy settings which includes previous settings that are still relevant as well as new privacy settings that have been added by Facebook. The majority of the old privacy settings are still relevant, however there’s a chance that you may now be sharing much more information with the whole world. Make it through our new Facebook privacy guide and you’re guaranteed to be safe.

Enabling collaborative micro-discussion in and out of the classroom
Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site.

An app developed by Purdue University. Something All schools should be ding

Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site.

One of the striking aspects of the #IranElection crisis has been the heavy use of social media. Iranians have relied on it to spread information on protests and to communicate their situation to millions of concerned people worldwide.
In fact, so much has been recorded via social media that it is possible to understand the progression of events through it. Thus, we have built a timeline of events utilizing information recorded via social media. This timeline uses Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia to paint a broad picture of the situation, as well as the growing conversation around it.

The Australian telecom Telstra recently released to the web the social media guide they designed for their employees. It's an animated graphic novel! I think they score points for both attributes (using visuals effectively and releasing it publicly).

Telstra - Austrian telecom - published social media guide for their employees

Pidgin is a great multi-protocol IM client. Out of the box it provides support for 15 different protocols, including most of the important ones: MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, and XMPP to name a few. Two glaring omissions include Facebook IM and Twitter - both of which are built-in to Digsby by default.

1. Hear the word Twitter. Scoff. 2. Hear it again from someone else. Scoff again. 3. Hear about famous celebrity who is apparently "On Twitter." Scoff, but make mental note to check it out. 4. Log into Facebook to comfort self. 5. Sign up for Twitter. 6. Give up because it seems dumb. 7. Loudly criticize others on Twitter. 8. Follow @johncmayer, @aplusk, @rainnwilson, @wilw, @mrskutcher, @oprah, and one other person you actually know. 9. Post tweet that is a variant of: "Trying out this Twitter thing." 10. Attempt to dig a little deeper into Twitter. 11. Notice rampant usage...

hysterical.

The 46 Stages of Twitter

"36. Alienate actual people in your life in an attempt to impress ones you don't know."

Motivate Facebook members to promote your products or events and engage with the campaign’s focus on tying social media with offline experiences is a great way to immediately make the organization's Facebook presence relevant.

Dunkin' Donuts: Profilbilder sollen neues Produkt bekannt machen

With the Keep It Coolatta sweepstakes, fans of the brand on Facebook (Facebook) (there’s over 800,000 of them) can post a photo of themselves with any Coolatta beverage to the Fan Page wall, add the caption #CoolattaGiveaway, and subsequently update their profile with the pic, and they’ll be entered to win a daily giveaway through June 24. Dunkin’ Donuts will randomly select winners, award the prizes, and update their official profile with the winning image.

Facebook is huge, Twitter is mainstream, and social media is everywhere. It’s now not unheard of for large and traditional brands to embrace the unknown for better or worse. Remember the Skittles ordeal?

"The constant barrage of invites to sign up for this group or download that app are starting to wear on social-network users, presenting big challenges for the brands and marketers who are looking to use these sites to aggregate fans and cultivate relationships with customers."

The constant barrage of invites to sign up for this group or download that app are starting to wear on social-network users.

AKQA had success with a Marmite group on Facebook. The savory spread's advertising message is "Love it or hate it," so the group works well as a discussion topic for social networkers. Fans post recipes, discuss weird and wonderful ways to enjoy the sticky black spread, tell tales of conversion to the taste and share frustrations about not being able to purchase it outside the U.K.
Too often, Mr. Beattie said, advertising on social networks is "still a traditional interruptive approach where brands are piggybacking on content that people value."
The IAB research found that exclusive content, which appeals to 28% of social networkers, and a genuine interest in the message, which attracts 37%, are the keys to a positive response from consumers on social networks. And because only 5% say that they actively dislike messages from brands, there are big opportunities for marketers who can hit the right notes

"Facebook is the world's leading social network, with over 300 million users and more than 900 employees. But how do you get the most out of it? To answer this question and more, Mashable has created The Facebook Guide Book, a complete collection of resources to help you master Facebook."

Great ex of co (Target) using its Facebook Page to give $$ to charity while brand blding via @John_Bailey (thnx!) http://bit.ly/om487 [from http://twitter.com/markivey/statuses/3375105856]

Retail chain Target already gives 5 percent of its income to charity. For the next couple weeks, they are going to be allocating those funds – which come out

Retail chain Target already gives 5 percent of its income to charity. For the next couple weeks, they are going to be allocating those funds – which come out to $3 million every week – to charities selected by Facebook users.
The company has launched the “Bullseye Gives” campaign on Facebook, which is essentially a voting application connected to the brand’s existing Facebook page.

Step 5: Start Inviting Friends
Once you’ve finished adding your applications and customizing your public profile, all you need to do is invite people to get started. One thing that I highly recommend is targeting nodes of individuals. If there is a tightly connected network of individuals among your friends, invite each of them on the same day. This way you increase the likelihood of your newly created Facebook Page becoming a recommended page.

The popularity of blogging seems to be fading as people turn to the easier aspects of social media: status updates and tweeting

Why? Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it's to easier things that people are turning. Facebook's success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can't index it to see who's talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives.

Artigo do editor de tecnologia do Guardian.

| Technology | The Guardian

Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it's to easier things that people are turning. Facebook's success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can't index it to see who's talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone's Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

Twitter has quietly given some developers access to a new feature, Sign in with Twitter, which uses Twitter's new OAuth technology to allow people to log into

which uses Twitter’s new OAuth technology to allow people to log into and ac

tter has quietly given some developers access to a new feature, Sign in with Twitter, which uses Twitter’s new OAuth technology to allow people to log into and access 3rd party websites using their Twitter accounts

Since I last posted numbers on Facebook's user base six week ago, the company has added close to 20 million active users. I've had a few requests for detailed numbers by country so I quickly assembled an update. Among countries with at least a million users, the fastest-growing are Indonesia and the Philippines.

# A new graph showing different types of fan interactions with the Page over time. Here, you see that the graph combines comments, wall posts, and likes to show relative volume of interactions.
# A new count of active fans this week, with full age/sex/location breakdown.
# A new count of total interactions this week, broken down by type.
# A new post quality rating, from 1 to 5 stars.
# Graphs for Interactions, Interactions per Post, Post Quality, Stream CTR, Posts, Page views, Media Consumption, Reviews

CubeTree places a large emphasis on the micro-updates, just like Twitter. The rationale behind this is that there are often things people maybe want others to know, but don’t want to send out an email to everyone in the company, as Fubini notes. With status updates, employees can give passive updates to coworkers which show up in their stream throughout the day. But that’s not all that goes into the feed, like FriendFeed (and now Facebook), CubeTree can import elements from other social services such as Google Reader shared items, TripIt trips, Salesforce data and others. And just like FriendFeed (and again, now Facebook), anyone can now comment on these items in the feed.

CubeTree artikkeli

CubeTree’s new enterprise collaboration suite, which is opening to the public tomorrow, has a familiar look: It looks like a cross between Facebook and FriendFeed (more-so before they were both recently redesigned). And that familiarity is part of the idea to getting this to work on the enterprise level. As with other social networks, there are two main components to CubeTree: The Feed and the Profile. But on CubeTree’s feed, instead of seeing updates from everyone in your social graph, you see updates from coworkers. And on your profile page, rather than highlighting pictures or videos of yourself, there is an emphasis on information and documents.

memory_brainOf course, it’s not that simple; but if you believe Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, Twitter and Facebook are very different beasts when it comes to improve your “working memory“, which relates to “the structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information in short-term memory.”

Of course, it’s not that simple; but if you believe Dr Tracy Alloway from the University of Stirling in Scotland, Twitter and Facebook are very different beasts when it comes to improve your “working memory“ [...]

Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber: Of course, it&#8217;s not that simple; but i.. http://bit.ly/mvYOS [from http://twitter.com/StoneCS/statuses/3818117834]

There are plenty of things to worry about when it comes to social media.
They are Skinner boxes designed to condition us to undervalue our privacy and to disclose personal information. They have opaque governance structures. They are walled gardens that violate the innovative spirit of the internet. But to deride them for being social, experimental and personal is to sound like a total fool.

I don't call my parents in Canada and recount the latest additions to my daughter's vocabulary because they need to know that the kid can say "elephant" and "potty" now; I call them up to say, "all is well with your son and his family", and "you are in my heart", and "I love you".
Criticizing the "banality" of Facebook conversation is as trite and ignorant as criticising people who talk about the weather. There's a reason we say "Did you sleep well?" at breakfast and "How was your weekend?" when we turn up to the office on Monday (and it's not that we care about the weekend or the rest).

About 5 months ago Alison Driscoll Comments
9 Fantastic Facebook Pages for Fashion
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facebook logoAlison Driscoll is an interactive copywriter and social media consultant who specializes in Facebook. She authors a blog at alisondriscoll.com.
The Internet has revolutionized the fashion world, making trends more accessible and affordable for everyone, and expanding where and when we can shop. Social media has taken fashion a step further, encouraging discourse on designers and providing real-time feedback on the looks that work, and the ones that don’t.
Facebook (Facebook)’s extensive list of features lets users comment on, post and share their favorite outfits and accessories with just a few clicks, anytime, from virtually anywhere. This social network has proved itself to be popular with savvy social shoppers for its fashion-forward Facebook Pages; here are 9 that use photos, apps and fan discussions for maximum impact.
For Deals
1. Rue La La
Rue La La is one

Promises to basically be the Next Generation's web browser for social networking.. In particular, Facebook is getting a fair share of mention in the early hypes right now.. Backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, will be fun to watch this something new as it evolves.. :)

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as ...

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is "the vector around which Facebook operates."
I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

New numbers about 'community destination' sites in the U.S. reveal that Twitter grew well over a thousand percent between February 2008 and February 2009. Read this blog post by Caroline McCarthy on The Social.

Ross Sandler of RBC has done what every good analyst should do, which is say something interesting. What Ross has said is that, at its current growth rate, Facebook will surpass Google in size by 2011-2012.

Ross Sandler of RBC has done what every good analyst should do, which is say something interesting. What Ross has said is that, at its current growth rate, Facebook will surpass Google in size by 2011-2012.

The web is filled with social networks: We have Twitter for meeting new people, Facebook for old college buddies, and Bebo for those of us who don’t want to hang out with the mainstream. Those social networks are rarely viewed as corporate services — they’re relaxing at the end of a long workday, not playgrounds for more business activity. But I would argue that social networks provide value to a business person on several levels, whether it be for those furiously working each day in a cubicle or for others closing big deals on the golf course.

Who likes me?
Is everything okay?
How can I become more popular?
What's new?
I'm bored, let's make some noise

If you want to understand why Twitter is so hot, look at those five attributes. They deliver all five, instantly.

Why people choose to visit online social sites:
Who likes me?, Is everything okay?, How can I become more popular?, What's new?, I'm bored, let's make some noise

The pillars of social media site success /Seth's Blog/ - Why people choose to visit online social ... http://tinyurl.com/ddgjj6 [from http://twitter.com/jorgefsb/statuses/1380983695]

5 things that drive social interaction/why people choose to visit online social sites:
* Who likes me?
* Is everything okay?
* How can I become more popular?
* What's new?
* I'm bored, let's make some noise

Chances are you wouldn't tell grandma about the wild party you went to last Saturday night. Likewise, you might have spent Sunday evening at home knittin' a mitten ...

This newest change in the privacy options for sharing content on Facebook represents a major change to the nature of communicating on the site. If it's implemented well it could make a dramatic difference in the way people use the site. Given the change underway and the company's move to lobby governments around the world in favor of its privacy philosophy, we think it would be a good idea to have a more thorough public conversation about what that philosophy is.

This is information I share with clients all the time - they are simple and seem like common sense when you read about them, but all too often overlooked by organisations when considering their social media policy.

"If the direction doesn’t come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo.
Despite the best intentions of agencies and consultants, social media integration is bound to meet huge resistance until top management says it’s OK to spend time and money to integrate it into the company’s marketing and culture."

I’ve been talking to several people recently about setting up a Facebook fan page, how to get more fans, and how to use Facebook effectively.
Full disclosure: Yes, I have a Facebook page, but it’s private. I use Twitter and LinkedIn for business, but I haven’t set up a page for my copywriting business.
However, I DO run a Facebook page for the same nonprofit that I mentioned in a recent post on email marketing. It’s performing well, averaging 50 new fans a day.

Social media allows us to discover, connect, and engage with new people of interest.

Social Network improvement

Social media allows us to discover, connect, and engage with new people of interest. While most people are open to new connections and receiving messages from people they don’t know, there is a fine line between reaching out and “spamming.” The challenge is to make a connection clearly and effectively without wasting people’s time.

"If we're building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can't justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I'm with Marshall on this one: Facebook's decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me.
People care deeply about privacy, especially those who are most at risk of the consequences of losing it. Let us not forget about them. It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?"

When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

Danah Boyd : “Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control."

There isn't some radical shift in norms taking place. What's changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn't mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn't mean that folks who live their lives in public don't value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

In December, Facebook made a series of bold and controversial changes regarding the nature of its users' privacy on the social networking site. The company once known for protecting privacy to the point of exclusivity (it began its days as a network for college kids only - no one else even had access), now seemingly wants to compete with more open social networks like the microblogging media darling Twitter.

In my journey through these systems, I’ve been seeing how each gives incentives to their users.
For instance, on Foursquare every time I check in it gives me points. If I check in a new place that it didn’t know about, it gives me a ton of points. It is rewarding my behavior. This “reward” turns very addictive.
Twitter, on the other hand, has its own incentive system. It puts all sorts of things in your face, like how many Tweets you’ve done, how many people you’re following, how many followers you have, and how many lists you are on.
Things that are measured become games and increase addiction. But Twitter has other games going on as well. Anytime someone uses your @name in a Tweet you see it. Remember that Dale Carnegie said in his book about how to win friends and influence people that your name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

I’m an addict. You already knew that, didn’t you? After all, I’m just about to pass my 30,000th Tweet and on Facebook I have more than 10,000 friends and on Foursquare I follow more than 3,000 people (about 1% of their user base as just reported).
I’m not the only addict, though. On Google there are 402,000 results for “social media addiction.” Someone even made a rap video about social media addiction.
In my journey through these systems, I’ve been seeing how each gives incentives to their users.
For instance, on Foursquare every time I check in it gives me points. If I check in a new place that it didn’t know about, it gives me a ton of points. It is rewarding my behavior. This “reward” turns very addictive.
Twitter, on the other hand, has its own incentive system. It puts all sorts of things in your face, like how many Tweets you’ve done, how many people you’re following, how many followers you have, and how many lists you are on.
Things that are measured become games and incre

Twitter, on the other hand, has its own incentive system. It puts all sorts of things in your face, like how many Tweets you’ve done, how many people you’re following, how many followers you have, and how many lists you are on.

I really tried to put alot of information as I could into Econsultancy’s Social Media Statistics, which is part of our Stats Compendium (a truly wonderful resource) but I find it is always neat to go back and review the old against the new.

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.
Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site.

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years.

According to The Nielsen Company, global* consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. In addition, the overall traffic to social networking sites has grown over the last three years. Globally, social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging. With 206.9 million unique visitors, Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009 and 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month. Time on site for Facebook has also been on the rise, with global users spending nearly six hours per month on the site. [...] Australia led in average time per person spent, with the average Australian spending nearly 7 hours on social media sites in December."

Social Media Statistics
* Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours.
* Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.
* LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide..

FT.com, January 15 2009.
Two-thirds of advertising agencies are not prepared for the industry changes prompted by social networks and new forms of digital media, a report has found.
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which will publish the “Social Media Futures” report compiled by Future Foundation next week, has warned that advertising agencies face growth of just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 if the industry fails to tackle the changes to the media created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Social networks enable consumers to pass on information about products and services, and recommendations from friends are more influential than traditional forms of advertising.

cost for agencies if they do not adapt to social networking as an advertising medium

As long as advertising don't relationship building, dialogue, honesty and authencity they can forget about playing a part in new media.

With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it's certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out.

HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we've reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead.

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

An utterly enthralling rant about the economics of the web, written 40,000 feet up in the air.
"Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet."

password friction paypal login

ASSERTION #2: The default startup business model for 2010 & beyond will be subscriptions and transactions (e-commerce, digital goods).
Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

To Increase Engagement, Brands to Allow Users To Login With Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
In a recent report titled the "Future of the Social Web" we found that we are entering the era of social colonization, every webpage and experience will be social

Jeremiah Owyang

A continued thought... the other part of Jeremiah's "Pollination" post. In that case, corps are putting their content out there... beyond their walls to make sure they are part of the unstructured/controlled conversation. In this case, corps are aggregating the other information onto their own site to bring the conversation closer to their home. Push/Pull at it's finest when taken together.

If you were to ask “over 200 social media leaders” which social media site they would pay for if they had to, as Abrams Research recently did, Facebook would come out on top, with 32.2 percent saying they would pay for it. (Yeah, right). LinkedIn was second, Twitter was third, and MySpace and Digg tied for last place (with only 1.5 percent of respondents saying they’d pay for those services).
But if you ask, which one would they recommend for businesses to pay for (if they had to), Twitter beats Facebook by more than two to one (39.6 percent vs. 15.3 percent). LinkedIn again comes in second. Why did Twitter come out on top. It is seen as an efficient way for companies to get their marketing messages out there. One typical response:

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

Social Media marketing is rapidly earning a role in the integrated marketing mix of small and enterprise businesses and as such, it’s transforming every

Social Media marketing is rapidly earning a role in the integrated marketing mix of small and enterprise businesses and as such, it’s transforming every division from the inside out. What starts with one champion in any given division, be it customer service, marketing, public relations, advertising, interactive, et al, eventually inspires an entire organization to socialize. What starts with one, a domino effect usually ensues toppling each department, gaining momentum, and triggering a sense of urgency through its path. And, it also marks the beginning of our journey through the ten stages of social media integration.

Social Media marketing is rapidly earning a role in the integrated marketing mix of small and enterprise businesses and as such, it’s transforming every division from the inside out. What starts with one champion in any given division, be it customer service, marketing, public relations, advertising, interactive, et al, eventually inspires an entire organization to socialize. What starts with one, a domino effect usually ensues toppling each department, gaining momentum, and triggering a sense of urgency through its path. And, it also marks the beginning of our journey through the ten stages of social media integration. ...

Data visualization of Facebook profiles: "Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. For example Columbus, OH and Charleston WV are nearby as the crow flies, but share few connections, with Columbus clearly part of the North, and Charleston tied to the South.
"Some of these clusters are intuitive, like the old south, but there's some surprises too, like Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas having closer ties to Texas than Georgia. To make sense of the patterns I'm seeing, I've marked and labeled the clusters, and added some notes about the properties they have in common..."

It's a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman's latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.

You are so vain and you've just handed (possibly) another rich lode for Google to mine. And you didn't know it.

Farhad Manjoo takes a look at Google's new profile option, which lets you control your brand in Google (to some extent). It could be a Facebook killer - or at leats be a new place you need to keep an eye on your brand.

For those out there who use Google and Facebook to manage events and calendaring, here’s another how-to that might not only make your busy lives a little less complicated, but will relieve you of the pain of having to keep up between multiple calendars.

In a few months, few will remember these privacy snafus. Just as people have forgotten about the Facebook News Feed fiasco and other Facebook disasters, people will forgive and forget about Buzz’s initial privacy concerns.

Lack Of Signal In A Sea of Noise
There’s an incredible amount of media and blogger noise about social networks, yet most focus on “killer app” hype without an objective point of view. My career mission? To cut out the hype and help companies make sense of what to do. For those fraught with information overload, this definitive matrix distills what matters.
Situation: New Contender Shakes Up Industry
Google has entered the social networking play with “Buzz”, and by the look of it, this time it’s for real. There’s a lot of market confusion on how they could stack up, so here’s my take. Let’s cut the noise and get to the heart of it with a comparison matrix based upon my insights talking to these companies in formal briefings, observations, as a user, my former research and dealing with the brands trying to reach them.
Executive Summary: Brands Must Stay Focused On Where Customers Already Are
Google’s entrance causes media havoc but web strategists should stay focused. Find out

if its important enough forJournalists to use....perhaps communications folks should follow along :-)

BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week. He said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories.

BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week BBC tells news staff to embrace social media |&#9;&#9;&#9;&#9;Media |&#9;&#9;&#9;&#9;guardian.co.uk

BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week

"BBC news journalists have been told to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News who took over last week. He said it was important for editorial staff to make better use of social media and become more collaborative in producing stories."

The average number is about 150, says leading anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

You can have friends because of what you do together or enjoy something together like football or shopping, but they're not as profound friends as those who you love for themselves because of something in their character.

Having more friends leads to earning more.

They usually consist of an inner circle of five "core" people and an additional layer of 10, he says. That makes 15 people - some will probably be family members - who are your central group and then outside that, there's another 35 in the next circle and another 100 on the outside. And that's one person's social world.

According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites.

I don’t feel the need to experiment with every new piece of software that emerges from its chrysalis, but I do feel a responsibility to you and my clients to have some idea of what’s out there and what’s worthwhile.
Also, at my social media speaking engagements hither and yon I’m often asked what tools I use. So, I took a personal inventory and created this overview of the 39 social media tools I use daily

So your biz is on Facebook, and brand engagement is up thanks to some savvy social media strategy. You might even be interested in further distinguishing your brand by building a custom landing page for your business account.

So your business is on Facebook, and brand engagement is up thanks to some savvy social media strategy. You might even be interested in further distinguishing your brand by building a custom landing page for your account.

Few, if any, educational institutes teach the art of proper digital communication. Most of us have simply made up an impromptu strategy and crossed our fingers in the hopes that disaster doesn’t strike. With a bit of help from our friends in the fields of psychology and information technology, we can apply the age-old intuitions of face-to-face conversation to whatever advances in technology come our way.

Alright, so we keep talking about how government agencies need to gain the trust of our communities so they'll follow our recommendations. In the same breath, we declare that social media will be that silver bullet that will make everyone believe what we say and will allow our response/outreach/efforts to succeed beyond our wildest dreams.
Turns out there's some research into how that actually happens. Take note and maybe your next response will be met with open ears and not wary eyes.

In a few minutes Facebook will become the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies' websites. Major networks have said for months that their ID could be used as OpenID, but becoming "relying parties" that accepted OpenID from elsewhere was the step everyone was waiting for. The dam has broken.

5/18/09
In a few minutes Facebook will become the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies' websites.

“We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.”

Some recent study info on social media: A recent study which looked at corporate blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles, about one-fifth of Fortune 100 firms only used one of the three channels. Those companies were overwhelmingly likely to choose Twitter (76%) over Facebook (14%) or blogging (10%).

@marshallk: "talking about an old classic post with MySpace on phone: Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid http://bit.ly/J7s2P"
(from http://twitter.com/marshallk/status/3110811430)

What are you doing? How about now? Has anything changed since you started reading this blog post? Every story has a who, what, where, when, and why - ...

The first version of the web was a navigable network of interconnected pages. The next version was based on easy self-publishing through blogs, video, commenting and the like. Still another big shift is believed to be underway; web applications are enabling and taking advantage of all that content to find patterns. Linked data, semantic analysis, analytics and data mining all form a layer on top of the content-web that could serve as the foundation for the next series of applications and other added value.

"In 1936, the music magazine the Gramophone reported that children had "developed the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker" and described how the radio programs were disturbing the balance of their excitable minds."

Slate Magazine

A useful historical look at the anxiety of technology and information overload.

This article from the Slate looks at a "history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook." It gives a fine perspective on how whilst the technology evolves, the essence of prophets of doom railing against the technology remain basically the same.

It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. After all, the Web earned gobs of cash for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And besides, going online means sending fewer fundraising letters, which makes it appealing to penny-pinchers and environmentalists alike.
But it turns out that approach doesn't always work

Only a tiny fraction of the 179,000 nonprofits that have turned to Causes as an inexpensive and green way to seek donations have brought in even $1,000, according to data available on the Causes developers' site. The application allows Facebook users to list themselves as supporters of a cause on their profile pages. But fewer than 1 percent of those who have joined a cause have actually donated money through that application.

It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. After all, the Web earned gobs of cash for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. And besides, going online means sending fewer fundraising letters, which makes it appealing to penn...

"The Facebook application Causes, hugely popular among nonprofit organizations seeking to raise money online, has been largely ineffective in its first two years, trailing direct mail, fundraising events and other more traditional methods of soliciting contributions. "

Nielsen Online, an analytics firm that tracks time spent online at various websites, has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email. While not shocking, the finding does mark an important point in the history of the web.

Social Networking Now More Popular Than Email, Report Finds http://bit.ly/DV8tQ (corrected link) [from http://twitter.com/AdNerds/statuses/1306994610]

Nielsen Online has issued a report finding that throughout 2008 social networking sites and blogs saw more time spent by users than personal email.

I’m not a psychologist, nor am I a parent, so let me start by saying she might be right that these sites are harmful in some cognitive way. But I think she’s wrong to assume social networking is devoid of a “cohesive narrative and long-term significance.” I can see where she’s coming from, but like a lot of people who don’t actually use these sites, she’s missing a fundamental shift from Web 1.0 chat room days to Web 2.0 social networks: Real identity.

RT @TechCrunch: FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses http://tr.im/imfp [from http://twitter.com/peterto/statuses/1467550396]

FriendFeed is in danger of becoming the coolest application that no one uses.

e fact is that FriendFeed may just be too complicated for the average user to quickly understand.

FriendFeed Is In Danger Of Becoming The Coolest App No One Uses http://ff.im/-1Y9U2 [from http://twitter.com/web2sil/statuses/1468873461]

Growth at Twitter, FriendFeed’s primary competitor, continues unchecked. According to Comscore the site is growing at approximately 33% a month and attracted just under 10 million unique worldwide visitors in February. It had just 1.2 million in February 2008. More importantly, every time I turn on the news, it seems the talking heads are pushing their Twitter account as their online identity. That kind of mainstream attention is driving users by the boatload. Meanwhile, competitor FriendFeed, despite a continuous stream of innovative new features, is languishing. It has just 637,000 monthly uniques according to Comscore, or about 6.4% of Twitter’s flow.

Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May: - via Judy Decicco

Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May:

I confess, I'd never even thought of declining entertainment factor as a reason for eBay's slow decline (and possible upcoming demise), but it makes a crapload of sense: while I went there occasionally for deals, most people I know eagerly shared hi-larious links for fun. Pays to know what business you're really in. (via @volckmann)

Artcile techcrunch

The author is writing about how eBay lost it's "pole position" due to the Markeplace developement on facebook.

This is a guest post by Keith Rabois, vice president of strategy and business development for Slide, the social entertainment company. Prior to Slide, Keith was a VP at LinkedIn and an EVP at PayPal in charge of among other things, competitive strategy vis-à-vis eBay. He also worked at eBay for three weeks following its acquisition of PayPal. Keith currently serves on the Board of Directors of Yelp, Vendio, Xoom and FanIQ.

MELBOURNE (Reuters Life!) – Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It'll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity.
The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.

Social media marketing is expected to dominate this year -- but the growing list of online social media sites makes choosing the right route complicated. From Facebook to YouTube to Digg and beyond, which media outlets will net the most bang for the buck in terms of customer communication, brand exposure, traffic, and search engine optimization (SEO)? Includes a downloadable PDF version of a chart on leveraging social media options

Do you know there are over 20 million people join as fans of Facebook Fan Pages daily? Forget about restricting Facebook as a private network. If you can get 5% of those people to land and join your fan page, the impact will be significant. Time to boost popularity of your fan page with the right Facebook applications.
I setup a fan page for Social @ Blogging Tracker 5 months ago. Since then I witnessed the wonders it did to my blog traffic, proven it’s one heck of a networking site to promote our blogs and online presence. If a Ms. Nobody like me can gain some from it, you definitely can too!

PR professionals use social media every single day to get the word out about clients, to communicate with customers and to respond to questions or problems. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites have quickly become important tools in a PR professional’s overall toolkit.

He added the company has been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online. Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands, which are always seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors' products.
Facebook's advertising technology already allows advertisers to choose which sort of customer will see their ­display adverts when they log on to the site. Advertisers can choose from such ­categories as where the user is located and their age and gender, based upon what the user has uploaded on to Facebook – which is adding about 450,000 new users a day.

Great article with stats on why Internet users become Fans/Followers & what that relationship results in in terms of sales.

Social media marketers looking for an indication that their efforts are helping the bottom line will be encouraged by findings from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate that social friends and followe

Social media marketers looking for an indication that their efforts are helping the bottom line will be encouraged by findings from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate that social friends and followers feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of.

Brendan Koerner argues that research shows that social media breaks actually boost the creativity and productivity of innovation-focused workers. He writes: "Twitter and Facebook give knowledge workers the chance to turn downtime into a game where creativity and insight are rewarded, if only with digital pats on the back."

RT @tcar Here's a great article to give your boss when they catch you slacking off on Twitter: http://bit.ly/amZ8qu

Contrary to recent research about social networks and efficiency, taking a break from work to read that tweet about Lady Gaga's lingerie might actually stoke creativity and enhance problem-solving skills.

Article discussing the value of "down time" in creativity, and extending the idea to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Brands today have the incredible opportunity of interacting with consumers on the #1 social network in the world – Facebook – and creating relationships with them that are long lasting, personal and relevant.

We've rounded up the week's essential social media reading into a one-stop-shop for the guides, lists, interviews, and how-tos you may have missed.

We have likely found a few of the week’s essential sources, nevertheless there’s usually which possibility you have missed something which can alter the advertising and marketing or perhaps company strategy.

In a unique marketing campaign to target the Internet era, BK is asking "What would you do for a free whopper?" In this case, delete 10 Facebook friends and receive a coupon. Your future ex-friends receive notification that you sacrificed them for a Whopper.

Burger King's innovative strategy to leverage Facebook for Social Media Marketing. A Facebook App that generates a coupon for free Burger King Whopper, when someone with FB profile deletes 10 friends from their profile...

Facebook, Twitter, other social media help drive business for ... - Chicago Tribune http://ff.im/-2pnCO [from http://twitter.com/chrisbechtel/statuses/1634130716]

While most digital media cost little to use, they do require an investment of time, something many small-business owners are short on. That's why small businesses are turning to experts for help keeping up with blog entries, Facebook announcements and Twitter tweets. "Go where your customers already are. Social media is not about being the first one into some new technology." Businesses should avoid using the hard sell, because participating in social media is like participating in a casual conversation.
"Nobody wants a salesman in the middle of their conversation."
One simple technique for building relationships involves responding to positive mentions by saying "thank you" and following up on negative mentions with an apology and a solution to the problem.
"If someone is unhappy and you say, 'I'm sorry. I'd like to fix it,' those things add up pretty fast."

A growing number of game makers on Facebook are making money from virtual goods — from poker chips to virtual clothes that users can buy or earn while playing gaming applications with their friends on Facebook. The combined ecosystem of these game developers and other companies supplying services to them could generate half a billion dollars in revenue in 2009.

Attempting to command, as well as deal with, the on the internet status has become increasingly hard.

But the nonsense we’re all worried about today? I just don’t think it will carry the same weight in a few years. Because if there are pictures of the person hiring you smoking pot in college online, and there are pictures of every other candidate smoking pot in college online, it just won’t be a big deal any more.
And the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor, and a sign of an ambitious individual who has pissed off a few people along the way.
At least that’s what I hope will happen. Because there are a few pictures of me in high school and college that I’m tired of trying to keep off the Internet. Let’s just get it all out there sooner rather than later, and move on.

by Michael Arrington, TechCrucnh - March 28, 2010

Trying to manage, or even control, the on the web status has become progressively difficult.

Facebook is more hierarchical: As a marketer, you can have a dialogue with people who identified themselves as fans of your brand or category. Then, you hope that they will spread the word to their friends. On Twitter, you have access not only to those who are most passionate about your brand, but to anyone who mentions it.

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

The Ted Conferences have always provided interesting and though provoking content. This is a great view on the impact of video with social networking... listen up... Barack Obama did... and won an election without a lot of substance, but with a lot of social networking connections and digital media.

Evolution of media:
1. The printing press and moveable type
2. Wireless and telephone
3. Recorded image and sound (photographs then audio)
4. Harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air (Radio and television)
Up until then we had an asymmetry of media - the media that's great at creating groups is no good at creating conversations and the media that's great at creating conversations is no good at creating groups. Then came…
5. The internet!
Key qualities…
• Media as site of coordination
• Consumers to producers
• Global, social, ubiquitous and cheap
• Convene people, not control them

"The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people."

Mark Robinson
Mark Robinson
Postet: 24.02.2009
Fast the Guardian har tröttnat... eller i alla fall Bobbie Johnson
"Nobody talks about people down the pub laughing about Bale's expletive-laden bullying as a 'social drinking sensation'. They don't call people giggling about it on the phone as a 'social telecommunications sensation'. They call it joking, or they call it gossip, because that's what people do. Whether they do it online or offline, down the pub or on Facebook doesn't matter. 'Social media' is mainstream - we don't need to claim any more victories for it. [...] Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end."

Social media is people. People talk about stuff. Good point :)

"Social media" is mainstream - we don't need to claim any more victories for it. So, that's it. I'm sick of "social media experts". (If I know you and you are one, then obviously I'm not talking about you). I'm sick of "social media sensations". And I'm sick of social media. Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end.

Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end.

Nobody talks about people down the pub laughing about Bale's expletive-laden bullying as a "social drinking sensation". They don't call people giggling about it on the phone as a "social telecommunications sensation". They call it joking, or they call it gossip, because that's what people do. Whether they do it online or offline, down the pub or on Facebook doesn't matter. "Social media" is mainstream - we don't need to claim any more victories for it.

Via, perhaps (but probably not) ironically, http://ash10.com

Bobbie Johnson has a righteous rant concluding with "Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end." I agree wholeheartedly. But I also think there's plenty of work to be done in this area. The issue, I think, is that most studies of "social media" miss the point and do so annoyingly loudly. This is also why I'm currently looking for a term to describe what I do that isn't "social media"...

It's time to realise that we don't need to measure every event in terms of what people are doing on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter

here did these social APIs originate, how have they evolved, and what are people going to be building in the future? This article explores some of the early days of the social media API, the growth of social networking platforms, and a few of the great innovations being

e session cookies for every photo request, but we’ll assume this is impractical giv

Last March, Facebook caught some flak when some hacks circulated showing how to access private photos of any user. These were enabled by egregiously lazy design: viewing somebody’s private photos simply required determining their user ID (which shows up in search results) and then manually fetching a URL of the form:
www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1&view=all&subj=[uid]&id=[uid]
This hack was live for a few weeks in February, exposing some photos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and (reportedly) Paris Hilton, before the media picked it up in March and Facebook upgraded the site.
Instead of using properly formatted PHP queries as capabilities to view photos, Faceook now verifies the requesting user against the ACL for each photo request. What could possibly go wrong? Well, as I discovered this week, the photos themselves are served from a separate content-delivery domain, leading to some problems which

9000, which can be searched in about 45 minutes using one script. This is also easily parallelisable, given that we can query any of the mirrored photo servers in the

Social plugins enable you to provide engaging social experiences to your users with just a line of HTML. Because they are hosted by Facebook, the plugins are personalized for all users who are logged into Facebook — even if the users haven't yet signed up for your site.

The Facebook that could have been: mockups from a proposed 2006 redesign. http://bit.ly/bEgZ5s (via @ztf)
– GOOD (GOOD) http://twitter.com/GOOD/statuses/12714946454

Our basic idea: To create an mail-application like interface with an elastic three-column layout that clearly separates filter, information-stream, and reaction:
Filter: The left side column works as a sorting instrument
Information-Stream: The center column shows the filtered results
Reaction: The right side column is used for discussing the individual feed items.

The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site. For logged-in Facebook users, the button is personalized to highlight friends who have also liked the page.
The basic Like button is available via a simple iframe you can drop into your page easily. A fuller-featured Like button is available via the <fb:like> XFBML tag and requires you use the JavaScript SDK. The XFBML version allows users to add a comment to their like as it is posted back to Facebook.

Now Trending on Mashable: "20 Essential Social Media Resources You May Have Missed" - http://bit.ly/97FUWy
– Pete Cashmore (mashable) http://twitter.com/mashable/statuses/12401749919

social media tools

"Big changes in the social media landscape this week mean there’s a lot to discuss. These posts highlight all the latest and greatest tools, tips, trends, and strategies for navigating the ever-changing social waters."

As theories circulate about the actual dollar value of sites like Facebook and
Myspace-analysts recently placed Facebook’s worth at $10 billion-there is no
question that people continue to gravitate in droves towards social networking
and blog sites. In the U.S. alone, total minutes spent on social networking sites
has increased 83 percent year-over-year. In fact, total minutes spent on Facebook
increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in
April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the No. 1 social networking site when
ranked by total minutes for the month.

afternoon Facebook posted about how the site is growing beyond regional networks and how networks will no longer be part of the privacy settings. The rationale is that the company has grown beyond it's previous boundaries …
Jun 4, 2009, 11:55 AM - In con

Top 10 Social Networking and Blog Sites Ranked by Total Minutes for April 2009 and Their Year-over-Year Percent Growth (U.S., Home and Work)

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to enable any web page to have the same functionality as a Facebook Page.
While many different technologies and schemas exist and could be combined together, there isn't a single technology which provides enough information to richly represent any web page within the social graph. The Open Graph protocol builds on these existing technologies and gives developers one thing to implement. Developer simplicity is a key goal of the Open Graph protocol which has informed many of the technical design decisions.

The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.

Facebook launched some fairly impressive new features and services at its recent f8 conference, but some of them were also more than just a little scary. Since a lot of what the company talked about was introduced in either “developer speak” — involving terms like API [...]

Article arguing that generic social networking such as Facebook will not last. Don't have enough information to decide whether he is right or not but worth reading

Facebook's Face Plant: The Poverty of Social Networks and the Death of Web 2.0 - The Huffington Post

Peter Schwartz has worked for Microsoft, lectured in political philosophy and is the Founder and President of an online legal publishing and database. This article is an interesting discussion of the pros and cons of Facebook and the interconnectivity these online applications allow.

Peter Schwartz explores the 'death' of Web 2.0 and how social networking is replacing the basis for business models. Schwartz also examines the decline of banner ads and the increase of advertising on Facebook and the revenue it generates. Ultimately the main focus of the article is on Facebook rather than online advertising.

The Huffington Post's Peter Schwartz claims that Web 2.0 is dead. Looking at Facebook, he asks if its business model is in trouble, and considers the risk that users will grow tired of the site.

Bebo is big in the UK undermining MySpace's dominance. FB and Twitter are contributing as well.

MySpace is struggling to keep up with its burgeoning rival, Facebook. It is now only half the size of Facebook and shrank by 2% in February while Facebook increased its user base by over 16%.

The "Place for Friends" is starting to feel lonely. MySpace, the Rupert Murdoch-owned website once synonymous with social networking, is losing popularity and key staff in its biggest troubles since launching five years ago.
Latest figures show that Murdoch is being beaten in the fight for social networks. MySpace suffered a drop in visitor traffic last month and is now less than half the size of its younger rival, Facebook.

The "Place for Friends" is starting to feel lonely. MySpace, the Rupert Murdoch-owned website once synonymous with social networking, is losing popularity and key staff in its biggest troubles since launching five years ago.

Staff quit social networking's former darling, now half the size of Facebook. The "Place for Friends" is starting to feel lonely. MySpace, the Rupert Murdoch-owned website once synonymous with social networking, is losing popularity and key staff in its biggest troubles since launching five years ago. Latest figures show that Murdoch is being beaten in the fight for social networks. MySpace suffered a drop in visitor traffic last month and is now less than half the size of its younger rival, Facebook. Three executives recently quit the one-time darling of the internet and there is speculation its co-founders will follow. MySpace's loss of status as the cool place to be is an object lesson in the notoriously fickle internet, where today's cultural icon is tomorrow's passing fad. From humble origins in 2003, the site led the so-called "Web 2.0" revolution in which users could create their own profile pages and share content with friends. Murdoch's purchase of MySpace for $580m was seen

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default.

Article showing comparison of Facebook's privacy policy over the years

History of Facebook privacy erosion.

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Since its incorporation just over five years ago, Facebook has undergone a remarkable transformation. When it started, it was a private space for communication with a group of your choice. Soon, it transformed into a platform where much of your information is public by default. Today, it has become a platform where you have no choice but to make certain information public, and this public information may be shared by Facebook with its partner websites and used to target ads.

Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests.
Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said.

There are now about 1.5 million female users older than 55 on the site, the group says -- roughly a 550 percent increase over six months ago. By comparison, membership among people younger than 25 grew by less than 20 percent over the same period, Inside Facebook says.

While online social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are known hang-outs for younger adults and teenagers, older generations in recent months have been taking to the medium at a faster rate than any other age group, according to industry reports.

Facebook and elderly

See for sources of stats about Facebook, and for ifo about Facebook adoption/usage.

Women older than 55 make up the fastest-growing age group on Facebook. Expert says the site has hit a "tipping point," causing older people to join. Some older family members use the site to get in touch with younger generations. One mother says Facebook has become her family's "living room."

In a session yesterday at Forrester’s Marketing Forum, Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Augie Ray presented research findings on peer influence and word of mouth marketing. Some of the statistics were surprising, and the presentation was rife with practical tips for marketers we thought worth sharing.

Facebook is a dangerous place to have a profile on - not because of maurading online predators, but because you don't know where you stand with it as a company. This research from the EFF proves that they are happy to re-jig their privacy rules in order make money from their users.

Thinking about quiting ole Facebook soon. http://is.gd/bZVab Just getting tired of it. But can I do it? Is the question. Started thinking
– Jabiz Raisdana (intrepidteacher) http://twitter.com/intrepidteacher/statuses/13623538994

RT @draenews: Del The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook: http://bit.ly/cEf3sP

In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a

"While the sniffing of e-mails is not unknown — it’s how Google serves up targeted ads in Gmail and how Yahoo filters out viruses, for example — the notion that a legitimate e-mail would be not be delivered based on its content is extraordinary."

Facebook private messages are governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which forbids communications providers from intercepting user messages, barring limited exceptions for security and valid legal orders.
While the sniffing of e-mails is not unknown — it’s how Google serves up targeted ads in Gmail and how Yahoo filters out viruses, for example — the notion that a legitimate e-mail would be not be delivered based on its content is extraordinary.

article re FB censoring messages containing piratebay

AHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHA

On Facebook, links to The Pirate Bay is not allowed even in private messages

Social media may have started out as a fun way to connect with friends, but it has evolved to become a powerful tool for education and business. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter and tools such as Skype are connecting students to learning opportunities in new and exciting ways. Whether you teach an elementary class, a traditional college class, or at an online university, you will find inspirational ways to incorporate social media in your classroom with this list.

Long list of inspiring ways to use social media in the classroom - much insight into informal learning.

@kynanr @willie42 100 ways to use social media in the classroom http://twurl.nl/a1tt5t

The week gone by was loaded with essential reading, especially in the tech department. We know you’re busy, and digging through that RSS reader for all the good stuff you missed is a chore.
That’s why we’ve once again gathered the Crème de la Crème in our weekly super-post. Take a weekend stroll through this garden of resources that includes a few environmentally friendly gadget guides, some killer small business advice, and an inbox master cleanse, which may be a weekend project itself.

Social networking could be a frightening prospect for smaller businesses; not like standard marketing methods, the idea places a part of the actual information in the hands of the buyers.

Advertising and marketing is usually a scary possibility regarding small business owners; not like classic marketing methods, this places section of the actual concept within reach of the actual consumers.

Advertising and marketing can be a scary probability for small businesses; not like traditional marketing techniques, it applies a part of your concept within reach of the customers.

Social media could be a alarming possibility pertaining to smaller businesses; in contrast to standard advertising models, the idea puts portion of the actual message within reach of your customers.

Social networking could be a scary prospect pertaining to smaller businesses; not like traditional marketing methods, this puts section of the particular principles within reach of the particular buyers.

Advertising and marketing can be quite a terrifying prospect regarding small businesses; unlike conventional marketing methods, the idea applies part of the actual principles within reach of the clients.

Social media is usually a terrifying prospective client for small business owners; in contrast to standard marketing techniques, the idea sets a part of the actual concept at the disposal of the particular customers.

As this data shows, successful social media marketing isn’t simply about amassing thousands of followers, but instead precisely identifying the most influential members of your audience and recognizing them for their value. By directly engaging one influencer with exclusive opportunities, special offers, and unique content, you are indirectly engaging thousands of other people who are part of this influencer’s social sphere. Sounds pretty enticing, right? But the challenge in crafting a successful marketing program that activates influencers is two-fold. First, you have to use the right data and traffic analysis tools to find out who your most influential followers are. Second, you have to connect with these people in an authentic, “non-salesy” way, and truly build a relationship with them –- because if you overly “sell” to your influencers, you’ll burn a bridge and potentially turn your biggest fans into your worst detractors.

Indeed, it is the period again — time to dive back in the week’s worth associated with social media marketing health benefits and get up to date upon any experience it's likely you have overlooked.

Yes, it’s that time again — time to delve back into a week’s worth of social media goodness and catch up on any insights you might have overlooked.
This round-up features a host of analysis and resources for social non-profits, great mobile app reviews, and some paper saving tips for your small business.

Before integrating Facebook Pages (sometimes called “Facebook Fan Pages”) into your social media marketing mix, you need to think strategically. Georgina provided a basic overview of the need for strategy in “Businesses and the Social Media Trap,” and I ranted about the problem of not understanding strategy in the first place in “It’s the Social Media Strategy Struggle.”
This week, I want to discuss why people become fans of Facebook Pages in the first place. I’ll follow that with some thoughts on what doesn’t really work on Pages. After that, I’ll list some things that I believe do work, based on personal and professional experience, industry news and anecdotal information.

"Zuckerberg was an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur... Zuckerberg represents the best and worst aspects of entrepreneurship. His drive, skill and fearlessness are only matched by his long record–recorded in lawsuit after lawsuit–of backstabbing, stealing and cheating."

Calcanis destroys Zuckerberg

Jason Calacanis' analysis of Zuckerberg as a throat-slitting sleazeball

Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral,
Asperger’s-like entrepreneur, I told Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that
Zuckerberg would try and slit his throat. I knew this because I
watched Zuckerberg screw over his users again and again in terms of
privacy, and I heard about the stories of him screwing over his former
employers at ConnectU and his early partners at Facebook.
The money quote from Business Insider’s scoop comes from Zuckerberg
himself: “they made a mistake haha. They asked me to make it for them.
So I’m like delaying it so it won’t be ready until after the facebook
thing comes out.” He stalled and sandbagged ConnectU–then
Zuckerpunched them! Of course, the person he said this to was his
partner–Eduardo Saverin–who he reportedly screwed as well.

With 450 million users globally (and millions more being added each week) Facebook is dominating the web in unparalleled ways. Yet, even as the social network has steadily grown over its short but remarkable history, many brands have remained on the sidelines of the social media revolution.
Facebook was the most visited site on the web for the week ending on March 13, 2010, surpassing even Google in week-long stats for the first time in history, according to Hitwise. The shift in user habits and audience targeting is palpable and it provides marketers, brand managers, issue advocates, and political campaigns today with an age old choice: Adapt and change or face irrelevance and extinction.

"Change happens. To survive it, you must anticipate it; and to be successful, you must embrace it." - http://krz.ch/vx1E
– Lars Neumann (lupmac) http://twitter.com/lupmac/statuses/12171530699

This is clearly the direction where social media campaigns are headed – going beyond simply having a presence on key social sites and also doing something creative that engages customers with your brand.

With all the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, many people are considering quitting the site altogether. If you're not ready to take it that far, here's how to avoid the privacy breaches without completely deleting your account and losing touch with your friends.

A great breakdown of Open Graph's potential impact on the Web and the possibilities available for developers

Really great take on why the Facebook Graph API is exciting and different than anything before it.

good overview

Four items as the key benefits to the web as a whole from the F8 announcements
1. No 24-hour caching limit
2. An API that is realtime and isn’t just about content
3. The Open Graph protocol
4. OAuth 2.0

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury.

Lee Aase is the manager for syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic. This means he’s in charge of making in-depth health and medical news content available directly to patients and interested consumers in order to encourage feedback, dialog, and sharing of information. He is also the chancellor of Social Media University, Global (SMUG), an institution that provides training in social media. In this interview he explains how the Mayo Clinic uses social media as a marketing and communications tool.

"I feel Mark doesn't believe in privacy that much, or at least believes in privacy as a stepping stone. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong."
Again in Kirkpatrick's book, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg puts it this way:
"Mark really does believe very much in transparency and the vision of an open society and open world, and so he wants to push people that way. I think he also understands that the way to get there is to give people granular control and comfort. He hopes you'll get more open, and he's kind of happy to help you get there. So for him, it's more of a means to an end. For me, I'm not as sure."
Facebook declined to comment about Mark's attitude toward privacy.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5#ixzz0o6FVa5qF

* Regardless of format, the most effective advertisements were those that were related to the content on the publisher’s website (i.e. a soup advertisement on a cooking website).
* Of the seven advertising types, banner ads and newsletter links were the most successful at encouraging purchase intent.
Surprisingly, the study suggests that banner ads may be the best choice for advertisers that want to push a product. However, for campaigns that want to build engagement, corporate profiles or sponsored content is the better option.

"...a click in the right direction for the armed service which seems to be making a slow but steady recovery from its lingering hostility towards social media."

The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.
Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service’s stories through social sites like Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Links to those sites featured prominently on the Army.mil homepage. The Army carefully nurtured a Facebook group tens of thousands strong, and posted more than 4,100 photos to a Flickr account. Yet the people presumably most interested in these sites — the troops — were prevented from seeing the material. Many Army bases banned access to the social networks.

Comcast's deft use of Twitter underscores what is becoming a staple in modern-day customer service. Increasingly, corporate giants such as Comcast, PepsiCo, JetBlue Airways, Whole Foods Market and others are beefing up direct communications with customers through social-media tools such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

RT @davidianm: http://onion.com/bBpcN3 via @TheOnion - New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It

"Through its competitive elements like badges and points, Foursquare helps generate brand loyalty," said the Ph.D.-holding individual, whose decades in higher education were basically shit upon by our inane questions about various bits of Foursquare ephemera. "It's a unique and transformative social networking tool."
"Can I go now?" he added.

With all the talk lately about Facebook's flawed privacy systems, it's a good time to consider what you're making available elsewhere on the web and on your system. These 10 settings tweaks and setups make your web life a little less public.

Well written review and research on FaceBook business pages versus personal pages.

For public figures on Facebook, the biggest change was the revamp of Facebook Pages. Now called "Public Profiles," these pages are supposed to act more like personal profiles - they can even update the News Feed. However, that alone stands as the only major change of note to these company-centric locales on Facebook. In almost all other ways, pages remain static, broken, and difficult.

Thousands of dancers jammed a major London train station in a Facebook-driven "flashmob" mimicking an advertisement for a phone company.

Thousands of dancers jammed a major London train station in a Facebook-driven "flashmob" mimicking an advertisement for a phone company.
And the event last Friday evening was so successful that another is planned for next Friday in Trafalgar Square in central London. Plus, a group has been set up to organize another one at Liverpool Street Station a week later.

Thousands of dancers jammed a major London train station in a Facebook-driven "flashmob" mimicking an advertisement for a phone company.
And the event last Friday evening was so successful that another is planned for next Friday in Trafalgar Square in central London. Plus, a group has been set up to organize another one at Liverpool Street Station a week later.
Videos posted on the social-networking site showed Liverpool Street Station completely filled with people, counting down the seconds until the clock showed 7 p.m., then dancing to music on their mp3 players as the hour struck.

Thanks to my very good friend @ikepigott, I heard about this Microsoft Vine project. It looks like a social networking aggregrator service that pulls information from tens of thousands of traditional media sources, as well as new media (your facebook and twitter friends for example) and presents it in a dashboard fashion. The new part is that it allows you to send alerts to groups of people you've identified in your social network (online and offline). They're pushing it out to the emergency management field now as beta testers. I just installed my copy tonight and will start playing around with it. If it looks useful, I'll be sure to post on it.

"Vine is a hyperlocal, personalized message and alert system. It's intended to be a dashboard that people can use to keep tabs of their family, friends, activities and major events in their community."

Twitter+Facebook on steroids?

Vine is a hyperlocal, personalized message and alert system. It's intended to be a dashboard that people can use to keep tabs of their family, friends, activities and major events in their community. The dashboard -- which appears as a widget on a PC screen -- displays a map of the user's community and the status of their contacts.

It’s the most secure distribution version of Windows XP ever produced by Microsoft: More than 600 settings are locked down tight, and critical security patches can be installed in an average of 72 hours instead of 57 days. The only problem is, you have to join the Air Force to get it. The Air Force persuaded Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to provide it with a secure Windows configuration that saved the service about $100 million in contract costs and countless hours of maintenance. At a congressional hearing this week on cybersecurity, Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, shared the story as a template for how the government could use its massive purchasing power to get companies to produce more secure products. And those could eventually be available to the rest of us.

Could be pretty cool.

officials are already trying to glean information from services such as Twitter and Facebook, but it's challenging because they're basically sending limited streams of text. Vine "provides an avenue to consolidate some of that information and analyze it in a more comprehensive way."
"The underlying technology, where it provides a more structured data form, will long-term be a very valuable asset, whether it's generated from Microsoft or others,'' he said.
Seattle is the first place Vine will be publicly available. During a testing period that begins today, people can sign up at www.vine.net to be among more than 10,000 testers the company hopes to enlist. Similar tests will begin shortly in a rural community in the Midwest and an isolated island community, the locations of which haven't been disclosed yet.

The popularity and near necessity of social media sites has grown tremendously in the last few years, helping small businesses make connections, giving freelancers and students the chance to network with people they’d never be able to meet otherwise, and allow a place for all kinds of interest groups to chat and make friends online–from gardeners to book lovers to sports junkies. There is a dangerous and corrupt side to social media creators and users; however, and the ability to create fake profiles and violate privacy and copyright rules is still more than possible. Read below for 25 of the most shocking crimes in social media history.

well hopefully NOT but still interesting read and a really nice ppt viewing application there too

The real test of Facebook Connect will be the opportunity for viral growth. So far there have been few implementations of Facebook Connect and it is difficult to test the success of each of these applications.

While officials would not say whether they were communicating with Iranians directly, one senior official noted that the US is learning about certain people being picked up for questioning by authorities through posts on Twitter.

In May 2009, Facebook became the most popular US social networking site.
But it was close.
According to comScore, Facebook totaled 70,278,000 unique visitors, up 97% from May 2008 to May 2009. MySpace hits shrank 5% over the same timeframe, fading to 70,255,000 unique visitors.

Chances are you use at least two major social networks - 49 million people, for example, visited both MySpace and Facebook in October 2008 (Comscore, worldwide). Nearly 7 million people in the UK use both Bebo and Facebook. A lot of people maintain very different friend lists on LinkedIn than MySpace or Facebook. Etc. And when you add in niche social sites like YouTube, Flickr, etc., there’s even more overlap among users.

Chances are you use at least two major social networks - 49 million people, for example, visited both MySpace and Facebook in October ...

Danger danger!! Facebook will damage your health. Too much screen time means much less physical connection with other people. i agree, we all need balance in our lives, but saying that Faceboo keeps people apart is a bit strange. "People's health could be harmed by social networking sites because they reduce levels of face-to-face contact, an expert claims. Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart."

People's health could be harmed by social networking sites because they reduce levels of face-to-face contact, an expert claims.
Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart.
Dr Sigman makes his warning in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.
A lack of "real" social networking, involving personal interaction, may have biological effects, he suggests.
He also says that evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance.
This, he claims, could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.
'Evolutionary mechanism'
Dr Sigman maintains that social networking sites have played a significant role in making people become more isolated.
"Social networking is the internet's biggest growth area, particular among young childre

This article focuses on health concerns that may arise due to lack of actual or "real" social networking that involves personal interaction. Author Dr Aric Sigman says that evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance. This, he claims, could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia. I wondered if this evidence was substantiated by any research. There are many mixed comments from readers suggesting the positive and negative effects of social networking sites for them. My opinion is that this article is valuable as it highlights health concerns, however, it must be recognised that most people to not solely rely upon online forms of communication and still participate in 'actual' socialing with people.

This one's an article from the BBC News, about the disadvantages of social-networking websites on health. It discusses how these sites could be altering the way our genes work, increasing problems like cancer, heart disease, dementia, and it also mentions the issue of decreasing 'face to face' contact. The article demontrates the other side of the story regarding social media and its convergences, and is of particular interest as it relates it all to the health of individuals involved. The article seems pretty legitimate as it is from a reputable news source, and also (conveniently) provides other readers comments and opinions to the topic beneath, whether they be for or against.

Over the past week there has been a bunch of buzz about what essentially are Facebook marketing hacks; quick “guerilla” tactics that help boost exposure to your profile or brand. Whether you are a small business or a big business, there are some quick “tricks” that can instantly gain you more exposure. These Facebook marketing hacks are not encouraged by Facebook and ultimately, I would assume that Facebook will develop filters for people gaming the system.

Social networking is a phenomenon both online and offline. "Steroid use (in baseball) spread because of the wicked combination of a closed network, or cluster, and positive reinforcement..."

Krebs believes everything is quantifiable as a social network, from steroid use to linked websites to a strand of HIV working its way through the porn industry.
He is at the cutting edge of the growing discipline of social network analysis, and creator of InFlow, one of the most advanced social networking software tools.
The field has exploded recently as social networks, the complex sets of relationships between members of groups, have formed the backbone of popular Web systems like Facebook and Google's search crawler. Social network analysts use software, like Keyhubs and NetMiner, to uncover how the structure of peoples' connections affect their thoughts and actions.

In the eyes of Valdis Krebs, the bulging bodies of baseball's steroid era reveal a problem exacerbated by a powerful social network.

The field has exploded recently as social networks, the complex sets of relationships between members of groups, have formed the backbone of popular Web systems like Facebook and Google's search crawler. Social network analysts use software, like Keyhubs and NetMiner, to uncover how the structure of peoples' connections affect their thoughts and actions.

Social Networks are among the most powerful examples of socialized media. They create a dynamic ecosystem that incubates and nurtures relationships between people and the content they create and share. Gives some growth stats

With the U.S. now accounting for only about a third of all Facebook users, we are starting to see a gradual shift away from its original demographic of college-age users (18-25): 46% of all users are 18-25 years old, down from 51% in late May. The number of users in the 18-25 segment is growing, but at a slower pace...

Currently, there are more than three million active Facebook Pages on the top ranked site, with the typical Page boasting an average of less than 1,000 fans – oops, I mean ‘likes‘ (seriously, that just doesn’t roll off your tongue quite the same way). Standing out from the static requires you to dress up your Page and make it more interesting and fun for your ‘likers’. That’s where Facebook applications come in. They’re basically like plugins for your Page and there are tens of thousands of them available. Deciding what apps you’d like to incorporate depends on how you’d like to engage with your peeps (that’s an even better word than ‘likers’).

How difficult is it to deleted your social networking account? in some cases very and in others imposible

[...] we’ll take a look at the account deletion processes of popular websites and services, and how easy or difficult they make it. Then we’ll discuss why sites make things so complicated, and some things to consider when designing your own deletion policies.

Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas. People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more.

Mark Zuckerberg/The Washington Post, May 24, 2010.

"There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services."

The issue with Facebook's latest change is not that they force you to link your interests without permission, but rather that they remove an option to express yourself on the profile without links. As we noted, Facebook users now face a Hobson's choice between the new Connections and no listed interests at all. As Facebook explains, "If you didn't connect to any of the suggestions, the sections of your profile to which those suggestions corresponded will now be empty." (The transition tool also allows you to delay the choice by saying 'Ask Me Later'). Previously, you could list interests in your profile without linking; after the transition, you cannot. You do have options to adjust visibility on the profile page, for which we commend Facebook, but nevertheless, this is not a true opt-out because the all the "Facebook Pages you connect to are public."

An ordinary human is not going to look through the list of Facebook's millions of cooking fans. It's far too large. Only data miners and targeted advertisers have the time and inclination to delve that deeply.

"Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook's privacy policy once promised, "No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.""

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from “Web site” to “website” (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow.

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from “Web site” to “website” (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow.
Among the more interesting changes –- at least from a grammar and style standpoint –- are separating out “smart phone” as two words, hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend and follow to be used both as nouns and verbs.
Beyond that, the AP has also defined a number of acronyms that are commonly used in texting and instant messaging. While most of them should be fairly well-known to regular web and mobile phone users (ROFL, BRB and G2G are among the definitions) one actually was new to me: POS.

Currently, there are more than three million active Facebook Pages on the top ranked site, with the typical Page boasting an average of less than 1,000 fans – oops, I mean ‘likes‘ (seriously, that just doesn’t roll off your tongue quite the same way). Standing out from the static requires you to dress up your Page and make it more interesting and fun for your ‘likers’. That’s where Facebook applications come in. They’re basically like plugins for your Page and there are tens of thousands of them available. Deciding what apps you’d like to incorporate depends on how you’d like to engage with your peeps (that’s an even better word than ‘likers’).

About six months ago, I threw together a blog post based on a bunch of social media infographics. At the time, they were surprisingly difficult to root out, but it seems that more are emerging, given the continued development and understanding of the channel.

Twitter’s very real-time functionality is obviously the main attraction of the service. But it can also be a downside — if you want to send a tweet at a specific time, you usually have to be poised over a keyboard or phone.
But there are some great solutions. The ability to post-date a tweet is useful for event promotion (where you may be busy at said event), to reach an audience in a different time zone, to space out your messages, or to keep your account nice and lively while you are away.
While some popular Twitter clients offer scheduling options built-in, others don’t. For those in need, here are five great, free online services you can use to queue up tweets for future broadcasting.
To narrow down the vast number of services out there, criteria for this list includes: 1) That it’s free; 2) That it offers OAuth “sign in with Twitter” access, or OpenID sign-in; and 3) That it does what it says on the proverbial packaging.
These five hand-picked options are our favorites, but as

Facebook’s a great place to put pictures you want your friends to see, but a terrible place for pictures you want your friends to download. Unless they know about Pick ‘N Zip, that is. This web app connects to your Facebook account and allows you to bulk download photos from Facebook. You can grab entire albums or even every photo tagged by a particular person.
To get started, just log in with Facebook. You’ll see the usual confirmation process before getting access to the app itself.

536Share
Exploring the software behind Facebook, the world’s largest site
Posted in Main on June 18th, 2010 by Pingdom
FacebookAt the scale that Facebook operates, a lot of traditional approaches to serving web content break down or simply aren’t practical. The challenge for Facebook’s engineers has been to keep the site up and running smoothly in spite of handling close to half a billion active users. This article takes a look at some of the software and techniques they use to accomplish that.

RT @thnorfar: RT @kylepace: Every Teacher's Must Have Guide To Facebook: http://bit.ly/a6JSDG #edchat

You can’t swing a stick in social media without hitting something on Facebook. Same goes for education. You can’t talk about how technology is revolutionizing education without mentioning Facebook. It’s a simple service to figure out but what about once you become a regular user?
If you’re a teacher, you would be well served by spending 3 minutes to read through this must-have guide. (We timed it out and it’s a bit under 3 minutes. It’s almost summertime, you can spare it for us!)

According to Rick Burnes, who leads the content production team at HubSpot, a marketing software firm that produces the Inbound Marketing Blog and Inbound ...See all stories on this topic (via Google Alerts and AlertRank)

Adults must read -> 5 Teen Social Media Trends that Can Be Applied to Small Business http://ow.ly/1ZP92
– Flowtown (Flowtown) http://twitter.com/Flowtown/statuses/16721168937

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social *opensource* network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business.

A social media marketing company called Syncapse surveyed 4,000 people who've Liked brands on Facebook and figured out how valuable those fans are.

Facebook Fans Spend More Money [STUDY]

The study (“The Value of a Facebook Fan: An Empirical Review”) estimates that someone who has Liked a brand will spend an average of $71.84 more each year on that brand’s products or services than will someone who has not Liked it on Facebook, for a total average annualized value of $136.38.

Site speed is one of the most critical company goals for Facebook. In 2009, we successfully made Facebook site twice as fast, which was blogged in this post. Several key innovations from our engineering team made this possible. In this blog post, I will describe one of the secret weapons we used called BigPipe that underlies this great technology achievement.

Pretty cool way of building webpages from facebook to make it super fast.

BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the dynamic web page serving system. The general idea is to decompose web pages into small chunks called pagelets, and pipeline them through several execution stages inside web servers and browsers. This is similar to the pipelining performed by most modern microprocessors: multiple instructions are pipelined through different execution units of the processor to achieve the best performance. Although BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the existing web serving process, it does not require changing existing web browsers or servers; it is implemented entirely in PHP and JavaScript.

Site speed is one of the most critical company goals for Facebook. In 2009, we successfully made Facebook site twice as fast, which was blogged in this post. Several key innovations from our engineering team made this possible. In this blog post, I will describe one of the secret weapons we used called BigPipe that underlies this great technology achievement.
BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the dynamic web page serving system. The general idea is to decompose web pages into small chunks called pagelets, and pipeline them through several execution stages inside web servers and browsers. This is similar to the pipelining performed by most modern microprocessors: multiple instructions are pipelined through different execution units of the processor to achieve the best performance. Although BigPipe is a fundamental redesign of the existing web serving process, it does not require changing existing web browsers or servers; it is implemented entirely in PHP and JavaScript.

As I thought about it, it became clear that web platforms really don't make much. Instead, they create the conditions that encourage others to invest their time and energy to create useful services. The value of Twitter is not in the software that runs on their servers; it is in the content that 180 million people contribute to their network - same with Facebook. Many would argue that Apple makes things, but even there, the full experience of the iPhone has a lot to do with the 200,000 applications that others created to run on the device.
A lot of people have begun using the term ecosystem to describe these big platforms. That captures their decentralized, emergent character, but ecosystems do not have a central point of control. Apple decided to eliminate third party analytics between one release and the next. That doesn't happen in an ecosystem. The right analogy is a government.

"They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook's failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits."

"Facebook's imbroglio over privacy reveals what may be a fatal business model..."

Privacy. Seemingly altruistic companies screwing over their users for monetization and business models

What lessons can we draw from the Facebook flameup? Lifecycle changes can trump generational change and cultural values perceived as crucial at the age of 13 can be very different at 20. A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.

If you're going to use Facebook, you should definitely know how to keep your information private.

Myspace is a social media site that is operated and drunk driving charge possessed. The positioning ended up being started by simply Mark Zuckerberg any time he or she had been the basic university student at Harvard as well as grew swiftly to incorporate hundreds of millions involving people

But if you're going to use Facebook, you should definitely know how to keep your information private.

Worried about Facebook privacy but still want to keep your account? A visual guide to how to lock it down.
http://bit.ly/aHcihN

You'll never quit. So protect yourself.

How To Set Your Privacy settings in Facebook - FB really, really made it hard to impossible.... ¦ http://bit.ly/bARi1x

Like most of you, I too LIKE Facebook, and ever since my last TechCrunch post (How to Build Engaging One-of-Kind Facebook Fan Pages), I've been exploring and trying to find new ways to improve the creation process of a Page. This time, I'd like to focus on a how-to for the musicians among you.

If you are one of the talented musicians on Facebook, this simple guide should be of great use to you.

"Using Facebook’s API, a website can take your interests and use them to personalize your browsing experience. ... Considering anyone can pull your Open Graph via Facebook’s API, this information can be used to personalize an online store based on your past purchases, likes, and preferences quite easily. ... According to Nielsen, 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know, and Facebook’s 'like' button is the perfect way to recommend a product to a friend."

Coupons remain a leading driver of brand interactions in social networks

“Those who still think that social network users are too busy engaging with friends to notice marketers must change their viewpoint,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Brand Interactions on Social Networks.” “Brand interactions are real, valuable and growing. “
According to a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research firm, 33% of Facebook users have become fans of brands on the network.

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

"Facebook speaks of itself as a utility while also telling people they have a choice. But there’s a conflict here. We know this conflict deeply in the United States. When it comes to utilities like water, power, sewage, Internet, etc., I am constantly told that I have a choice. But like hell I’d choose Comcast if I had a choice. Still, I subscribe to Comcast. Begrudgingly. Because the “choice” I have is Internet or no Internet.
I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

"I hate all of the utilities in my life. Venomous hatred. And because they’re monopolies, they feel no need to make me appreciate them. Cuz they know that I’m not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them."

Good reminder RT @MR21c How to Return Facebook Privacy Settings to What You Signed Up For http://bit.ly/d7VapU via @lifehacker

"Online privacy expectations are evolving, but whether Facebook likes it or not, a lot of us want the privacy settings we signed up for when we joined the service. Here's how to use Facebook's new privacy controls to regain your original privacy."

Facebook markup language or FBML for short is used in a variety of places within the social network. Anyone who has written any Facebook applications will already be pretty familiar with its tags, and will probably have used it to write data to walls, or share postings with others programmatically. If however you haven’t yet dipped your toe in the water of the Facebook API, or indeed haven’t actually needed to – there are some snippets of FBML which prove to be mighty useful when creating custom Facebook Fan Pages, and can easily and quickly out of the box be used with the FBML widget, which adds an extra much needed layer of customisation to an existing Facebook fan page. The static FBML widget can be added multiple times, and in multiple places (sidebar and tabs) to facilitate this. Once you’ve added it to your page, simply go to “edit page”, then under Applications click “edit” under Static FBML. This will give you the options you need to paste in your code.

Where you start your digital day says a lot about you, according to a new study http://bit.ly/cNcnY8 (via @isabelleokane) /via @gleonhard

http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/google-ranking-algo-survey.gif
Where you start your digital day says a lot about you, according to a new study from ExactTarget, an e-mail and social media marketing company.
If you check e-mail first, the company said, you tend to be more task-oriented and only interact with brands online when you need something, such as researching a deal, getting information about promotions or finding new product information.
However, if start your day with a visit to Facebook, you might welcome “extracurricular” content from brands, such as interaction and entertainment that isn’t directly related to a purchase or business transaction.

There's a new Facebook search site out there with a concept similar to PleaseRobMe, a site that demonstrates just how easy it is for bad guys to use social networking crap to tell when you're away from your home. This new Facebook Search allows anyone to search for potentially embarrassing updates that can now be viewed by the public.

Facebook presents a unique opportunity to connect with and educate your target market in a way that your website and even your blog can’t match. The trick is coming up with meaningful content that people will want to share, and that brings them back again and again.
Become an industry resource
Expand beyond your wall
Lighten up
Engage the community

Millions of people log onto social media Web sites daily, prompting such varied organizations as Gaithersburg-based MedImmune, the American Red Cross and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to follow. But simply creating an account on Facebook or Twitter rarely equates to being plugged in. Area consultants said many organizations spend ample time and resources on social media without seeing much return. Here are 10 common mistakes that they see businesses, nonprofits and government agencies make.

Good set of points for those of you interested in using Social Media to promote your organization. http://ow.ly/26eed

here are six reasons social media might not be working for you—along with ways to overcome these problems.

Top 6 Social Media Mistakes And How to Fix Them (#SocialMedia Examiner) - http://is.gd/dkdez

"Top 6 Social Media Mistakes And How to Fix Them | Social Media Examiner" http://j.mp/bZU4Hy

While there are many success stories of people using social media for personal and business reasons, there are also plenty of people who may feel their efforts are not paying off.
Whether you use social media to market your business, increase sales, promote your blog, or raise awareness for a non-profit organization, here are six reasons social media might not be working for you—along with ways to overcome these problems.

Top World Cup Players on Facebook, Day by Day
Millions of people around the world have been actively supporting – or complaining about – their favorite teams and players. Below, players are sized according to the number of mentions on Facebook during each day of the World Cup.

Top World Cup Players on Facebook, Day by Day
Millions of people around the world have been actively supporting – or complaining about – their favorite teams and players. Below, players are sized according to the number of mentions on Facebook during each day of the World Cup.

I used to love Facebook. I was in law school at Wisconsin when it launched, and everyone I knew on the site was basically a peer -- people who I'd known well or at least met in person at some point. Then... I graduated. Suddenly having a Facebook account full of pictures from blurry nights in Madison and Pulitzer Prize-caliber dirty jokes from my friends wasn't so awesome anymore -- especially once I started working for Engadget and lots and lots of people I didn't actually know (or, somewhat even worse, only knew professionally) started looking at my personal page. So I needed a system -- a way to still use Facebook to share personal stuff with friends, professional stuff with colleagues, and awesome stuff with everyone, all without blurring any lines or accidentally sharing too much with people I don't know.

I used to love Facebook. I was in law school at Wisconsin when it launched, and everyone I knew on the site was basically a

Facebook’s search strategy, the company has confirmed with us that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”. Earlier this week we published about the new Facebook SEO that’s possible via the Open Graph, but now it’s clear that this is the beginning of Facebook’s internet search strategy. The race is now on for publishers to optimize their sites for Facebook’s search engine.

While there was a lot of speculation about Facebook’s search strategy, the company has confirmed with us that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”. Earlier this week we published about the new Facebook SEO that’s possible via the Open Graph, but now it’s clear that this is the beginning of Facebook’s internet search strategy. The race is now on for publishers to optimize their sites for Facebook’s search engine.

While there was a lot of speculation about Facebook's search strategy, the company has confirmed with ...

LinkedIn and Wikipedia users were more likely to browse around company Websites before leaving. LinkedIn users, however, tended to be interested in “careers” pages, suggesting the business-oriented social network refers many job seekers. It was visitors from Wikipedia who were most likely to be carrying out product research.

Facebook’s search strategy, the company has confirmed with us that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”. Earlier this week we published about the new Facebook SEO that’s possible via the Open Graph, but now it’s clear that this is the beginning of Facebook’s internet search strategy. The race is now on for publishers to optimize their sites for Facebook’s search engine.

While there was a lot of speculation about Facebook’s search strategy, the company has confirmed with us that “all Open Graph-enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”. Earlier this week we published about the new Facebook SEO that’s possible via the Open Graph, but now it’s clear that this is the beginning of Facebook’s internet search strategy. The race is now on for publishers to optimize their sites for Facebook’s search engine.

While there was a lot of speculation about Facebook's search strategy, the company has confirmed with ...

There’s no question of Facebook’s position at the top of the social networking space, and one thing that makes the site so powerful is that when it comes to social networking, a user’s friends must be users too. But among some teens, Facebook may be losing its stickiness.

There’s no question of Facebook’s position at the top of the social networking space, and one thing that makes the site so powerful is that when it comes to social networking, a user’s friends must be users too. But among some teens, Facebook may be losing its stickiness.
According to a study from OTX and virtual fashion site Roiworld, nearly one in five teens with a Facebook profile had decreased or discontinued their use of the site as of April 2010.
What’s more, the decreases seemed to speed up in recent months, with two-thirds of the lapsed users having turned away from the site in the past six months.

decrease apparently not related to privacy or influx of older users: it's just boring!

Google starts the gaming service, actually the social network based games. At the end, Zynga is the winner who takes all the attentions from many companies interested in social games including facebook, yahoo, google and etc. That is, there is always a niche business.

Google aism to make Zynga (creators of Farmville) the cornerstone of Goolge games; expected to go live late Dec 2010 - posted circa July 2010

"Once social activism meant protest marches, civil obedience and sit-ins. But for today's 20-somethings ... supporting or denouncing a cause is as simple as hitting the "like" button on Facebook or posting a hashtag to Twitter. And that's often where it ends.... But that can also be where it begins...."

How to Get the Social-Media Generation Behind Your Cause http://adage.com/digital/article.php?article_id=144686&qwr=FullSite

Adults born between 1982 and 1992 came of age during a decade that promised an "embarrassment of riches," said Eliza Esquivel, TBWA's planning director and author of the study. "They were told that the future was theirs to win, and they've been very empowered, very educated, and as a result this is a very optimistic group."
At the same time, they are a group that witnessed spectacular failures of institutions and corporations, having witnessed the scandal at Enron and now being bombarded with news of misdoings by Goldman Sachs and BP. Thus along with their optimism, this is a group equally prone to cynicism about corporate efforts.

Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web http://bit.ly/9NCUuw #socialmedia

I've done this search dozens of times since December and have shared it in slides many times since. It's a search that compares the world wide search volume on

great comparisons in stats on "social media"

What’s also interesting is that the decline of Web 2.0 and the rise of social media are connected. Since Facebook has hit the scene, the original social media tools have peaked in usage: blogs, wikis, forums and RSS.

"IRL: In Real Life. It's used as shorthand all over the Internet, to distinguish what happens online from what happens offline. And it's a lie. If we still refer to the offline world as 'real life,' it's only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century."

Why are we ashamed of our online lives? It is part of our lives. http://ow.ly/2dlxy
– baldy7 (baldy7) http://twitter.com/baldy7/statuses/18914126930

Why are we ashamed of our online lives? It is part of our lives. http://ow.ly/2dlxy

"It's time to start living in 21st century reality: a reality that is both on- and offline. Acknowledge online life as real, and the Internet's transformative potential opens up..."

There's no denying the differences between life online and off. In our online lives we shake off the limitations of our physical selves, perhaps even our names and consciences, too. What remains are the fundamentals: human beings, human conversations, human communities. To say that "reality" includes only offline beings, offline conversations and offline communities is to say that face-to-face matters more than human-to-human.

What if we stopped all the hand wringing and really honored our online lives? http://j.mp/dcifHx #wrbm #life_online

RT @MichaelSurtees: RT @Malbonnington: 2 sides to a story: The bliss found in switching off: http://j.mp/dyvrSc; & the joys of being onl ...

Business bloggers at Harvard Business Review discuss a variety of business topics including managing people, innovation, leadership, and more.

Via Ida: "everything_is_in_real_life" :P

"IRL: In Real Life. It's used as shorthand all over the Internet, to distinguish what happens online from what happens offline. And it's a lie. If we still refer to the offline world as 'real life,' it's only a sign of deep denial — or unwarranted shame — about what reality looks like in the 21st century."

I’ve done this search dozens of times since December and have shared it in slides many times since. It’s a search that compares the world wide search volume on Google for new media, web 2.0, and social media. What the above graph shows is that we’re at an inflection point in the language we use to describe the macro trends of innovation on the web. I believe it’s the indicator that we’re in the 3rd Era of the Web and it’s The Era of Social Media.

An interesting series of graphs about the rise and rise of social media, especially Facebook

Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web http://bit.ly/9NCUuw #socialmedia

This article needs a great big "citation needed" slapped on it. Yes, people need to think about what they post on the web, but no, that stuff will not stay around "forever." If anything, the web suffers from the opposite problem: memory loss.

"We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts....It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you."

Use a lot of thought and caution before posting to the web...it never forgets and is a critical part of what others may see about your one-time identity...even if it was 40 years ago!

Interesting article about how the Internet remembers everything we put in it and how it would be better both for us and our society if it forgot with time (like humans).

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from vi

How best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing—where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever.

thx, lg :) RT @AmirKassaei: Great Read! NYTimes: The Web Means the End of Forgetting http://nyti.ms/anOZh7

NYTimes: The Web Means the End of Forgetting http://nyti.ms/anOZh7

The digital age is facing its first existential crisis: the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on.

Compulsion explains the feeling of struggling to return to something in spite of ourselves. Its flipside involves the disrespect of time that we might otherwise spend doing more valuable things—or even just pondering the thoughtful and unexpected ideas that an asynchronous game might raise. Social games so covet our time that they abuse us while we are away from them, through obligation, worry, and dread over missed opportunities.

"You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence." -- Reminds me of the game where you do the dishes.

The dialectic between theory and practice often collapses into a call and response panegyric. This in mind, I thought it might be productive to make an example that would act as its own theory.